Ur:': i 


4 i • 

» t 4 .it 




V * i 1 -I V -- 


•4f 4 ^ ^ • 


JwiH'rSi!/ 


t 


i’* 7 ’. r* ; 

< .« * i 1 jT '» 


3 r tf I ij ■• ^ 


14 <•! 


^ I < » ♦ < 


.• r /. 1 t • ) < 


I ■« f S » 




1 < 4 • * 


u» -* f »i 


-V, 

is \ 

\:k 


r' Y 


( .t(i -I • 


Hhi 


H I • 

y? 


.•1 4t »' *» 5f t» 

I •« T * f *, V - I * • '■ 

T’-f' *TVY‘ 

A t « «' ■ « • a « > v I V ^ 


Jy ♦ • I •( •* ^ 

* ^ 1 I I 9 . > I ^ •( M I a 

• t.- j a 4 ■ I < I ' a a t 

. r ^ I ' a » I !• • . I .• I 

-t t I .'. •< » a --, a > 1 j a \ 

-• 3 ‘ « I r •? » '• ‘ 

,• a '. II » It I I . •! a » 


I I 

-! •: .( a 3 1 c« V a ti • *,» f 

• » » »a * i .» *; a » t i. . •( 

• a 'a , j ; » ■ s j ■? -a 

I d wa ;» If ii \s 

l «a>«ia)r-Hi*v» 

i a •< -I s < « 1 j 1 

• » V ». ; » \ ? a < a -• t ■ 


• • • ^ ^ 9 

.,4 . t H - . 

r . I - * > • 

a-*.?’ 

;« .'.i >?y» 

* .• Y > i ^ > a T J 3 * 

TVC.-^a 


* I 1 a 

■f ■ r • * 1 

'j a k t’ « • 

If - I i * 
u a * ■ % • .1 

a.AVr.^ 


4 ^ • : 

,4 / * j a 41 

j -. •■ i ♦ • ■ « 

y I •/ » *» • > 

' . I < 4 a r 

,1 4.* ^ * 

3 T •• » / / t 4 

f - I » • J I w 

::r.r;r\f 

\7l7^?:y7 

% \ ( ^4, 

t t%7\r: 


t i .1 1 

.i‘S« 'Y y« 


*4 >4 a 4 1. 

». !* .3 f 




t4’jr;4Y i 

'» V a • \ • t 

Yi.i't# ir 

- r i aT . I s 

* ,1 . 0 4 - '> 


• » • • I* » V* 

• t t. ■■ t t \ 
i a < I r « 

■a - 4 > * 3 

- • « il > 

> a I • ' ' a 

. a VI* ^ ' J 

ir * . » r 
9 1 > • a a .1 

a ^ , ii v4 

if':/*:' 

i "* . .“af •. 

« / I 9 9 • a 
vi a tt a i* M 
r -4 * a I t * 

{ .a A » .4 A 
■• .a t J I - I 

- f 4 ' a a i 

* :* 4 ‘vV*r 

\r r',i\ 

U\7'7\ 

f j ‘ V J a 


7\7*.r.c 


tt.lV 


SYiia* 
1 1 ♦ 

I Vift- 


sa f 

\(i7 

*1 •••* 3 
&< V a 




• » f ^ 


♦ ft jA 


« I 4 4 -> 


4 a 


-J 4 V 4 V a 4 ♦ • f * • » 

•• V 1 > • fe I J J % .3 ' ^4 I 

r 4 . f > C - T 4 T .< t 1 I 

I .a a _4 r i I 3> r ai t • 4 > t 

; • f a 7 • 't •• f .4 'll 

I '4i *, « f « « Ji 4 a. • f. V a 


t > I 4 * V* 

V« ‘ t • (« 


\;‘V7;: 


A iru 

I ■ » .'4 ' ^ . 

>. 4 * • I iJ 
I .4^4-; 

1 . > a « 1 

I I ' r • I 

-' 1 •<:’ ^4 

,4 • ' - I 

» i i 4 -S4 

I * 4 • * ( - 

, • ', ■ A r 

• a -a .1 

t .3 I ■< ’■ a: 

.• » 4 

a t t ' ! I 
■a I * <♦ 
> « ' c . 
; a 9 .! ' 
■ •> a -44 V 


-t4 / a -HI .« i -’L- 

( *14* » • 4 » a 1 

v.! «? -c a ;» ft r, 

r . T • 1 ' € A i » ^ r .* I. 


4 -I I 


r . T • 1 ' € A i » ^ r .*1. 

jalf*/«49v--.jp-4! 

{ I r t a 4 • •- 4 N t *, • 4 . a \ 3 '. * • 

J « .9 • j a J • 3 I ^ I . » . 

• •> a • 4 ■ a '. : .• I “3 j V 4 
".• is % -} • ' I *-• I 41 » ? • 

a ' f All H 4 »' a 3 a X a A a 


■ •> a -44 V 

•' . ' a ..1 a 

» <4 .a * > 

I 4 S f 

a U a V t ’» 
-; ■* ■ f i -a 

a <1.4- 

A. 4(4 

i.tl 
r'sjfuru 
? t ? ? .'I 


j f • » *1 • - / f 3 A t a J 1 

.■ .« • A) S -a,- A" .-*1 HI ^4 
' I ■ 4 S - 4 'I !» ? t 

1 4 jr» \ f t 71 ?) 

I ' a \ » > » • ■ j * . 1 4 >v 

. a ' a a -i e j 4 i-*! r a s 

I 4 r • a' .; I • a * I -. f *1 .< 

'•. t J'* -3 • .a -r .> • V • -t ♦ >- 

' a f 9 I • 1 •• 1 r I J * , 


» *1 A « • I » V* 

-’4 : » a a 

aa « > . • • t ' A - 1 




1 • * I VO* ' a J • a I 
* «•• *3 f ‘ 


,• • II ' 4j>» * a i r a a 3 

f a . I . , I ^ f '* ‘4 

VlHf S A4 A*i\t 


57 1."-?.* 

r « V » -I 

i;;* a; 

•7V * 

V r \ Y ^ > 


' 4 • 

“ 7 V 




' » \ T ■ i • ' V ‘ “ t ' 

4 i?f Sail ,t;.*iai 

I ; r , T a^ • « 3 ^ ' * *3 

•a fit ^4 V 1 -* a -^4 • » ' 

If A * »± )S -.1 ■ f .• 

» t -a ? - I '■ t ^ ^ r a - 

'vT Af a a W ' e r I ’7 ^ 

?tf 

» .» s’ I -» 4 1 * » 1 ^ *1 ’ * 

1 i a i- a ■a . 4 4 _ _- a. 


1 f i: 1. 


I >4 J* 


































.'75, o 

WA ® 


o -^V C,*^ "AW/\"c 

Z’. y _ V ^ Z ^ '’ 

" =Vif\''^' ^.^'''^/> ' ^iPr ^ %■= ' 

. c- ‘^, ?• -i V 

^ '>°o ' * ■ ' '/ ' ” ';. 

J^nr/yO?^ 'f' ’>' \\ cS?\'^'5k. '' -i- ^sy/A 

r v^ ° r 


I ' A ^ C^‘ a ’ " ^ (^l \. 


\> s ' ’ 

^ .aJldmA^yft^ 



* V\^ - v—aNi i .t^ 

^ ^ A ^ 0 N C . 

^ vr c T. ' <>' \ 










% 


. X 











- ... 






WE GIRLS: 


A HOME STORY. 


BT 


MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY, 

n ^ 


lUTHOa OP “ FAITH GARTNEY’S GIRLHOOD,” “THE GATWORTHYS,” “A SUMME* 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 


THIRTY-THIRD EDITION. 



> > > 


BOSTON: 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. 

(3tU UiUerj^itie ^Tambrilroe. 

1887 . 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, 
BY FIELDS, OSGOOD', & GO., 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



¥ 



i r < 


CAMBRIDGE t PRINTED AT THE RITERSIDE PRESS. 

s • 


9 


/ 

i: 

r 








CHAPTER VI. 


CO-OPERATING 

CHAPTER VII. 


92 


SPRINKLES AND GUSTS, 


\ 

HALLO WEB^. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


109 


125 


CONTENTS. 


iv 

CHAPTER IX. 

WINTER NIGHTS AND WINTER DAYS 144 


CHAPTER X. 

ruth’s responsibility. 162 

CHAPTER XI. 

Barbara’s buzz. 180 

CHAPTER XII, 

EHERGENCIES . .lOS 


•i 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY 


CHAPTER r. 


THE STORY BEGINS. 


f rillll 

i 

ipiii 

R 




^ 

1 



miles 

Up 

have 


T begins right in the middle*, 
but a story must begin some- 
where. 

The town is down below the 
hill. 

It lies in the hollow, and 
stretches on till it runs against 
another hill, over opposite ; up 
which it goes a little way before 
it can stop itself, just as it does 
on this side. 

It is no matter for the name 
of the town. It is a good, large 
country town, — in fact, it has 
some time since come under 
city regulations, — thinking suf- 
ficiently well of itself, and, for 
that which it lacks, only twenty 
from the metropolis. 

our hill straggle the more ambitious houses, that 
shaken off the dust from their feet, or their founda- 
1 


2 


WE GIELS: A HOME STORY. 


tions, and surrounded themselves with green grass, and 
are shaded with trees, and are called “ places.” There 
are the Marchbanks places, and the “ Haddens,” and the 
old Pennington place. At these houses they dine at five 
o’clock, when the great city bankers and merchants come 
home in the afternoon train ; down in the town, where 
people keep shops, or doctors’ or lawyers’ offices, or man- 
age the Bank, and where the manufactories are, they eat 
at one, and have long afternoons ; and the schools keep 
twice a day. 

We lived in the town — that is, Mr. and Mrs. Holabird 
did, and their children, for such length of the time as their 
ages allowed — for nineteen years ; and then we moved 
to Westover, and this story began. 

They called it “ Westover,” more or less, years and 
years before; when there were no houses up the hill at 
all; only farm lands and pastures, and a turnpike road 
running straight up one side and down the other, in the 
sun. When anybody had need to climb over the crown, 
to get to the fidds on this side, they called it “ going west 
over ” ; and so came the name. 

We always thought it was a pretty, sunsetty name ; 
but it is n’t considered quite so fine to have a house here 
as to have it below the brow. When you get up suffi- 
ciently high, in any sense, you begin to go down again. 
Or is it that people can’t be distinctively genteel, if they 
get so far away from the common as no longer to well 
overlook it? 

Grandfather Holabird — old Mr. Rufus, — I don’t say 
whether he was my grandfather or not, for it does n’t 
matter which Holabird tells this story, or whether it is a 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


3 


Holabird at all — bought land here ever so many years 
ago, and built a large, plain, roomy house ; and here the 
boys grew up, — Roderick and Rufus and Stephen and 
John. 

Roderick went into the manufactory with his father, — 
who had himself come up from being a workman to being 
owner, — and learned the business, and made money, and 

married a Miss Bragdowne from C , and lived on at 

home. Rufus married and went away, and died when 
he was yet a young man. His wife went home to her 
family, and there were no little children. John lives in 
New York, and has two sons and three daughters. 

There are of us — Stephen Holabird’s family — just six. 
Stephen and his wife, Rosamond and Barbara and little 
Stephen and Ruth. Ruth is Mrs. Holabird’s niece, and 
Mr. Holabird’s second cousin ; for two cousins married 
two sisters. She came here when she had neither father 
nor mother left. They thought it queer up at the other 
house ; because “ Stephen had never managed to have 
any too much for his own ” ; but of course, being the 
wife’s niece, they never thought of interfering, on the 
mere claim of the common cousinship. 

Ruth Holabird is a quiet little body, but she has her 
own particular ways too. 

There is one thing different in our house from most 
others. We are all known by our straight names. I say 
known ; because we do have little pet ways of calling, 
among ourselves, — sometimes one way and sometimes 
another ; but we don’t let these get out of, doors much. 
Mr. Holabird does n’t like it. So though up stairs, over 
our sewing, or our bed-making, or our dressing, we shorten 


4 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


or sweeten, or make a little fun, — though Rose of the 
world gets translated, if she looks or behaves rather spe- 
cially nice, or stays at the glass trying to do the first, — or 
Barbara gets only “ Barb ” when she is sharper than com- 
mon, or Stephen is “ Steve ’’ when he ’s a dear, ^and 
“ Stiff” when he ’s obstinate, — we always introduc^’^^ my 
daughter Rosamond,” or “my sister Barbara,” or, — but 
Ruth of course never gets nicknamed, because nothing 
could be easier or pleasanter than just “Ruth,” — and 
Stephen is plain strong Stephen, because he is a boy and 
is expected to be a man some time. Nobody writes to us, 
or speaks of us, except as we were christened. This is 
only rather a pity for Rosamond. Rose Holabird is such a 
pretty name. “ But it will keep,” her mother tells her. 
“ She would n’t want to be everybody’s Rose.” 

Our moving to Westover was a great time. 

That was because we had to move the house ; which is 
what everybody does not do who moves into a house by 
any means. 

We were very much astonished when Grandfather 
Holabird came in and told us, one morning, of his having 
bought it, — the empty Beaman house, that nobody had 
lived in for five years. The Haddens had bought the 
land for somebody in their family who wanted to come out 
and build, and so the old house was to be sold and moved 
away ; and nobody but old Mr. Holabird owned land near 
enough to put it upon. For it was large and solid-built, 
and could not be taken far. 

We were a great deal more astonished when he came 
in again, another day, and proposed that we should go and 
live in it. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


5 


We were all a good deal afraid of Grandfather Holabird. 
He had very strict ideas of what people ought to do about 
money. Or rather of what they ought to do without it, 
when they did n’t happen to have any. 

Mrs. Stephen pulled down the green blinds when she 
saw him coming that day, — ■ him and his cane. Barbara 
said she did n’t exactly know which it was she dreaded ; 
she thought she could bear the cane without him, or even 
him without the cane ; but both together were scare- 
mendous ; they did put down so.” 

Mrs. Holabird pulled down the blinds, because he would 
be sure to notice the new carpet the first thing ; it was a 
cheap ingrain, and the old one had been all holes, so that 
Barbara had proposed putting up a board at the door, — 
“ Private way ; dangerous passing.” And we had all 
made over our three winters’ old cloaks this year, for the 
sake of it : and we had n’t got the carpet then till the 
winter was half .over. But we could n’t tell all this to 
Grandfather Holabird. There was never time for the 
whole of it. And he knew that Mr. Stephen was troubled 
just now for his rent and taxes. For Stephen Holabird 
was the one in this family who could n’t make, or could n’t 
manage, money. There is always one. I don’t know 
but it is usually the best one of all, in other ways. 

Stephen Holabird is a good man, kind and true ; loving 
to live a gentle, thoughtful life, in his home and among 
his books ; not made for the din and scramble of business. 

He never looks to his father ; his father does not believe 
in allowing his sons to look to him ; so in the terrible time 
of ’57, when the loss and the worry came, he had to 
Uruggle as long as he could, and then go down with the 


6 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


rest, paying sixty cents on the dollar of all his debts, and 
beginning again, to try and earn the forty, and to feed and 
clothe his family meanwhile. 

Grandfather Holabird sent us down all our milk, and 
once a week, when he bought his Sunday dinner, he 
would order a turkey for us. In the summer, we had all 
the vegetables we wanted from his garden, and at Thanks- 
giving a barrel of cranberries from his meadow. But 
these obliged us to buy an extra half-barrel of sugar. 
For all these things we made separate small change of 
thanks, each time, and were all the more afraid of his 
noticing our new gowns or carpets. 

“ When you have n’t any money, don’t buy anything,” 
was his stern precept. 

“ When you ’re in the. Black Hole, don’t breathe,” 
Barbara would say, after he was gone. 

But then we thought a good deal of Grandfather Hola- 
bird, for all. That day, when hej^ame in and astonished 
us so, we were all as busy and as co§ey as we could be. 

Mrs. Holabird was making a rug ofi the piece of the 
new carpet that had been cut out for the hearth, border- 
ing it with a strip of shag. Rosamond was inventing a 
feather for her hat out of the best of an old black-cock 
plume, and some bits of beautiful downy white ones with 
smooth tips, that she brought forth out of a box. 

“ What are they. Rose ? And where did you get 
them ? ” Ruth* asked, wondering. 

“ They were dropped, — and I picked them up,” Rosa- 
mond answered, mysteriously. “ The owner never missed 
them.” 

“ Why, Rosamond ! ” cried Stephen, looking up from 
his Latin grammar. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 7 

K 

“ Did ! ” persisted Rosamond. “ And would again. 
I ’m sure I wanted ’em most. Hens lay themselves out 
on their underclothing, don’t they ? ” she went on, quietly, 
putting the white against the black, and admiring the 
effect. ‘‘ They don’t dress much outside.” 

“ O, hens ! What did you make us think it was people 
for?” 

“ Don’t you ever let anybody know it was hens ! Never 
cackle about contrivances. Things must n’t be contrived ; 
they must happen. Woman and her accidents, — mine 
are usually catastrophes.” 

Rosamond was so busy fastening in the plume, and giv- 
ing it the right set-up, that she talked a little delirium of 
nonsense. 

Barbara flung down a magazine, — some old number. 

“ Just as they were putting the very tassel on to the 
cap of the climax, the page is torn out! What do you 
want, little cat ? ” she went on to her pussy, that had 
tumbled out of her lap as she got up, and wa^ stretching 
and mewing. “ Want to go out doors and play, little 
cat ? Well, you can. There ’s plenty of room out of 
doors for two little cats ! ” And going to the door with 
her, she met grandfather and the cane coming in. 

There was time enough for Mrs. Holabird to pull down 
the blinds, and for Ruth to take a long, thinking look out 
from under hers, through the sash of window left un- 
shaded ; for old Mr. Holabird and his cane were slow ; 
the more awful for that. 

Ruth thought to herself, “ Yes ; there is plenty of room 
out of doors ; and yet people crowd so ! I wonder why we 
can’t live bigger ! ” 


8 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 



Mrs. Holabird’s thinking was something like it. 

“ Five hundred dollars to worry about, for what is set 
down upon a few square yards of ‘ out of doors.’ And in- 
side of that, a great contriving and going without, to put 
something warm underfoot over the sixteen square feet 
that we live on most ! ” 

She had almost a mind to pull up the blinds again ; it 
was such a very little matter, the bit of new carpet, after 
all. 

“ How do I know what they were thinking ? Never 
mind. People do know, or else how do they ever tell 
stories? We know lots of things that we dorCt tell 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


9 


all the time. We don’t stop to think whether we know 
them or not ; but they are underneath the things we feel, 
and the things we do. 

Grandfather came in, and said over the same old stereo- 
types. He had a way of saying them, so that we knew 
just what was coming, sentence after sentence. It was a 
kind of family psalter. What it all meant was, “ I ’ve 
looked in to see you, and how you are getting along. I do 
think of you once in a while.” And our worn-out re- 
sponses were, “ It ’s very good of you, and we ’re much 
obliged to you, as far as it goes.” 

It was only just as he got up to leave that he said the 
real thing. When there was one, he always kept it to 
the last. 

“ Your lease is up here in May, is n’t it, Mrs. Stephen ? ” 

“ Yes, sir.” 

I ’m going to move over that Beaman house next 
month, as soon as the ground settles. I thought it might 
suit you, perhaps, to come and live in it. It would be 
handier about a good many things than it is now. Ste- 
phen might do something to his piece, in a way of small 
farming. I ’d let him have the rent for three years. 
You can talk it over.” 

He turned round and walked right out. Nobody 
thanked him or said a word. We were too much sur- 
prised. 

Mother spoke first ; after we had hushed up Stephen, 
who shouted. 

I shall call her “ mother,” now ; for it always seems as 
if that were a woman’s real name among her children. 
Mr. Holabird was apt to call her so himself. She did not 


10 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


altogether like it, always, from him. She asked him 
once if “ Emily ” were dead and buried. She had tried 
to keep her name herself, she said ; that was the reason 
she had not given it to either of her daughters. It was 
a good thing to leave to a grandchild ; but she could not 
do without it as long as she lived. 

I “We could keep a cow ! ” said mother. 

“ We could have a pony ! ” cried Stephen, utterly dis- 
regarded. 

“ What does he want to move it quite over for ? ” asked 
Rosamond. “ His land begins this side.” 

“ Rosampnd wants so to get among the Hill people ! 
Pray, why can’t we have a colony of our own ? ” said 
Barbara, sharply and proudly. 

“ I should think it would be less trouble,” said Rosa- 
mond, quietly, in continuation of her own remark ; hold- 
ing up, as she spoke, her finished hat upon her hand. 
Rosamond aimed at being truly elegant. She would never 
discuss, directly, any questions of our position, or our lim- 
itations. 

“ Does that look — ” 

“Holabirdy?” put in Barbara. “No. Not a bit. 
Things that you do never do.” 

Rosamond felt herself flush up. Alice Marchbanks 
had said once, of something that we wore, which was 
praised as pretty, that it “ might be, but it was Holabirdy.” 
Rosamond found it hard to forget that. 

“ I beg your pardon. Rose. It ’s just as pretty as it 
can be ; and I don’t mean to tease you,” said Barbara, 
quickly. “ But I do mean to be proud of being Hola- 
birdy, just as long as there ’s a piece of the name left.” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


11 


I wish we had n’t bought the new carpet now,” said 
mother. “ And what shall we do about all those other 
great rooms ? It will take ready money to move. I ’m 
afraid we shall have to cut it off somewhere else for a 
while. What if it should be the music, Ruth ? ” 

That did go to Ruth’s heart. She tried so hard to be 
willing that she did not speak at first. 

“ ‘ Open and shet is a sign of more wet ! ’ ” cried 
Barbara. “ I don’t believe there ever was a family that 
had so much opening and shetting ! We just get a little 
squeak out of a crack, and it goes together again and 
snips our noses ! ” 

“ What is a ‘ squeak ’ out of a crack ? ” said Rosamond, 
laughing. “ A mouse pinched in it, I should think.” 

“ Exactly,” replied Barbara. “ The most expressive 
words are fricassees, — heads and tails dished up together. 
Can’t you see the philology of it ? ‘ Squint ’ and ‘ peek.’ 

Worcester can’t put down everything. He leaves some- 
thing to human ingenuity. The language is n’t all made, 
— or used, — yet ! ” 

Barbara had a way of putting heads and tails together, 
in defiance — in aid, as she maintained — of the diction- 
aries. 

“ O, I can practise,” Ruth said, cheerily. “ It will be 
so bright out there, and the mornings will be so early ! ” 

“ That ’s just what they won’t be, particularly,” said 
Barbara, “ seeing we ’re going ‘ west over.’ ” 

“ Well, then, the afternoons will be long. It is all the 
same,” said Ruth. That was the best she could do. 

“ Mother,” said Rosamond, “ I ’ve been thinking. Get 
grandfather to have some of the floors stained. I think 


12 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


rugs, and English druggets, put down with brass-headed 
nails, in the middle, are delightful. Especially for a coun- 
try house.” 

“ It seems, then, we are going ? ” 

Nobody had even raised a question of that. 

Nobody raised a question when Mr. Holabird came in. 
He- himself raised none. He sat and listened to all the 
propositions and corollaries, quite as one does go through 
the form of demonstration of a geometrical fact patent at 
first glance. 

“We can have a cow,” mother repeated. 

“ Or a dog, at any rate,” put in Stephen, who found it 
hard to get a hearing. 

“ You can have a garden, father,” said Barbara. “ It 's 
to be near to the parcel of ground that Rufus gave to his 
son Stephen.” 

“I don’t like to have you quote Scripture so,” said 
father, gravely. 

“ I don’t,” said Barbara. “ It quoted itself. And it 
is n’t there either. I don’t know of a Rufiis in all sacred 
history. And there are n’t many in profane.” ‘ 

“ Somebody was the ‘ father of Alexander and Rufus ’ ; 
and there ’s a Rufus ‘ saluted ’ at the end of an epistle.” 

“ Ruth is sure to catch one, if one ’s out in Scripture. 
But that is n’t history ; that ’s mere mention.” 

“We can ask the girls to come ‘ over ’ now, instead of 
‘ down,’ ” suggested Rosamond, complacently. 

Barbara smiled. 

“ And we can tell the girl tq^come ‘ over,’ instead of 
‘ up,’ when she ’s to fetch us home from a tea-drinking. 
That will be one of the ‘ handy ’ things.” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


13 


“ Girl ! we shall have a man, if we have a garden.” 
This was between the two. 

“Mayhap,” said Barbara. “And perlikely a wheel- 
barrow.” 

“We shall all have to remember that it will only be 
living there instead of here,” said father, cautiously, put- 
ting up an umbrella under the rain of suggestion. 

The umbrella settled the question of the weather, how- 
ever. There was no doubt about it after that. Mother 
calculated measurements, and it was found out, between 
her and the girls, that the six muslin curtains in our 
double town parlor would be lovely for the six Windows 
in the square Beaman best room. Also that the parlor 
carpet would make over, and leave pieces for rugs for 
some of our delightful stained floors. The little tables, 
and the two or three brackets, and the few pictures, and 
other art-ornaments, that only “ strinkled,” Barbara said, 
in two rooms, would be charmingly “ crowsy ” in one. 
And up stairs there would be such nice space for cushion- 
ing and flouncing, and making upholstery out of nothing, 
Ithat you could n’t do here, because in these spyglass 
houses the sleeping-rooms were all bedstead, and fireplace, 
and closet doors. 

They were left to their uninterrupted feminine specula- 
tions, for Mr. Holabird had put on his hat and coat again, 
and gone off west over to see his father ; and Stephen had 
“piled” out into the kitchen, to communicate his delight 
to Winifred, with whom he was on terms of a kind of 
odd-glove intimacy, neither of them having in the house 
any precisely matched companionship. 

This ought to have been foreseen, and an embargo put 


14 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


on ; for it led to trouble. By the time the green holland 
shades were apportioned to their new places, and an ap- 
proximate estimate reached of the whole number of win- 
dows to be provided, Winny had made up her gregarious 
mind that she could not give up her town connection, and 
go out to live in “ such a fersaakunness ’’ ; and as any re- 
mainder of time is to Irish valuation like the broken 
change of a dollar, when the whole can no longer be 
counted on, she gave us warning next morning at break- 
fast that she “ must just be lukkin out fer a plaashe.’’ 

“ But,” said mother, in her most conciliatory way, “ it 
must be two or three months, Winny, before we move, 
if we do go ; and I should be glad to have you stay and 
help us through.” 

“ Ah, sure, I ’d do annything to hilp yiz through ; an’ 
I ’m sure, I taks an intheresht in yiz ahl, down to the little 
cat hersel’ ; an’ indeed I niver tuk an intheresht in anny 
little cat but that little cat ; but I could n’t go live where 
it wild be so loahnsome, an’ I can’t be out oo a plaashe, 
ye see.” 

It was no use talking ; it was only transposing sei^ 
tences ; she “ tuk a graat intheresht in us, an’ sure she ’d 
do annything to hilp us, but she must just be lukkin out 
fer hersel’.” And that very day she had the kitchen 
scrubbed up at a most unwonted hour, and her best bon- 
net on, — a rim of flowers and lace, with a wide expanse 
of ungarnished head between it and the chignon it was 
supposed to accommodate, — and took her “ afternoon out ” 
to search for some new situation, where people were sub- 
ject neither to sickness nor removals nor company nor 
children nor much of anything ; and where, uijder these 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


15 


circumstances, and especially if there were “ set tubs, and 
hot and cold water, she would probably remain just about 
as long as her “ intheresht ” would not allow of her con- 
tinuing with us. 

A kitchen exodus is like other small natural commo- 
tions, — sure to happen when anything greater does. 
When the sun crosses the line we have a gale down be- 
low. 

“ Now what shall we do ? ” asked Mrs. Holabird, for- 
lornly, coming back into the sitting-room out of that va- 
cancy in the farther apartments which spreads itself in 
such a still desertedness of feeling all through the house. 

“ Just what we’ve done before, motherums ! ” said Bar- 
bara, more bravely than she felt. “ The next one is some- 
where. Like Tupper’s ‘ wife of thy youth,’ she must be 
‘ now living upon the earth.’ In fact, I don’t doubt 
there ’s a long line of them yet, threaded in and out 
among the rest of humanity, all with faces set by fate to- 
ward our back door. There ’s always a coming woman, 
in that direction at least.” 

^ “I would as lief come across the staying one,” said 
Mrs. Holabird, with meekness. 

It cooled down our enthusiasm. Stephen, especially, 
tvas very much quenched. 

The next one was not only somewhere, but everywhere, 
it seemed, and nowhere. “ Everything by turns and 
nothing long,” Barbara wrote up over the kitchen chim- 
ney with the baker’s chalk. We had five girls between 
that time and ovir moving to Westover, and we had to 
move without a girl at last ; only getting a woman in to 
do days’ work. But I have not come to the family-mov- 
ing yet. 


16 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


The house-moving was the pretty part. Every pleas- 
ant afternoon, while the building was upon the rollers, 
we walked over, and went up into all the rooms, and 
looked out of every window, noting what new pictures 
they gave as the position changed from day to day ; how 
now this tree and now that shaded them : how we gradu- 
ally came to see by the end of the Haddens’ barn, and at 
last across it, — for the slope, though gradual, was long, — 
and how the sunset came in more and more, as we squared 
toward the west ; and there was always a thrill of' excite- 
ment when we felt under us, as we did again and again, 
the onward momentary surge of the timbers, as the work- 
men brought all rightly to bear, and the great team of 
oxen started up. Stephen called these earthquakes. 

We found places, day by day, where it would be nice to 
stop. It was such a fiinny thing to travel along in a 
house that might stop anywhere, and thenceforward be- 
long. Only, in fact, it could n’t; because, like some 
other things that seem a matter of choice, it was all pre- 
ordained ; and there was a solid stone foundation waiting 
over on the west side, where grandfather meant it to be. 

We got little new peeps at the southerly hills, in the 
fresh breaks between trees and buildings that we went by. 
As we reached the broad, open crown, we saw away down 
beyond where it was still and woodsy ; and the nice 
farm-fields of Grandfather Holabird’s place looked sunny 
and pleasant and real countrified. 

It was not a steep eminence on either side ; if it had 
been the great house could not have been carried over 
as it was. It was a grand generous swell of land, lifting 
up with a slow serenity into pure airs and splendid vision. 


WE GIRLS. A HOME STORY. 


17 


We did not know, exactly, where the highest point had 
been ; but as we came on toward the little walled-in ex- 
cavation which seemed such a small mark to aim at, and 
one which we might so easily fail to hit after all, we saw 
how behind us rose the green bosom of the field against 
the sky, and how, day by day, we got less of the great 
town within our view as we settled down upon our side 
of the ridge. 

The air was different here , it was full of hill and pas- 
ture. 

There were not many trees immediately about the spot 
where we were to be ; but a great group of ashes and 
walnuts stood a little way down against the roadside, and 
ail around in the far margins of the fields were beautiful 
elms, and round maples that would be globes of fire in 
autumn days, and above was the high blue glory of the 
unobstructed sky. 

The ground fell off suddenly into a great hill-dimple, 
just where the walls were laid ; that was why Grand- 
father Holabird had chosen the spot. There could be a 
cellar-kitchen ; and it had been needful for the moving, 
that all the rambling, outrunning L, w nch had held the 
kitchens and woodsheds before, should be cut off and 
disposed of as mere lumber. It was only the main build- 
ing — L-shaped still, of three very large rooms below and 
five by more subdivision above - vhich had majestically 
taken up its line of march, like the star of empire, west- 
ward. All else that was needful must be rebuilt. 

Mother did not like a cellar-kitchen. It would be in- 
convenient with one servant. But Grandfather Holabird 
had planned the house before he offered it to us to live in. 

2 


18 


WE GIKLS.- A HOME STORY. 


What we were going to save in rent we must take out 
cheerfully in extra steps. 

It was in the bright, lengthening days of April, when 
the bluebirds came fluttering out of fairy-land, that the 
old house finally stopped, and stood staring around it with 
its many eyes, — wide open to the daylight, all its green 
winkers having been taken off, — to see where it was 
and was likely to be for the rest of its days. It had a 
very knowing look, we thought, like a house that had 
seen the world. 

The sun walked round it graciously, if not inquisitively. 
He flashed in at the wide parlor windows and the rooms 
overhead, as soon as he got his brow above the hill-top. 
Then he seemed to sidle round southward, not slanting 
wholly out his morning cheeriness until the noonday glory 
slanted in. At the same time he began with the sitting- 
room opposite, through the one window behind ; and then 
through the long, glowing afternoon, the whole bright 
west let him in along the full length of the house, till he 
just turned the last corner, and peeped in, on the longest 
summer days, at the very front. This was what he had 
got so far as to do by the time we moved in, — as if he 
stretched his very neck to find out the last there was to 
learn about it, and whether nowhere in it were really yet 
any human life. He quieted down in his mind, I suppose, 
when from morning to night he found somebody to beam 
at, and a busy doing in every room. He took it serenely 
then, as one of the established things upon the earth, and 
out us in the regular list pf homes upon his round, that he 
w^as to leave so many cubic feet of light at daily. 

I think he might like to look in at that best parlor. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


19 


With the six snowy-curtained windows, it was like a 
great white blossom ; and the deep-green carpet and the 
walls with vine-leaves running all over them, in the 
graceful-patterned paper that Rosamond chose, were like 
the moss and foliage among which it sprung. Here and 
there the light glinted upon gilded frame or rich bronze 
or pure Parian, and threw out the lovely high tints, and 
deepened the shadowy effects, of our few fine pictures. 
We had little of art, but that little was choice. It was 
Mr. Holabird’s weakness, wlien money was easy with 
him, to bring home straws like these to the home nest. 
So we had, also, a good many nice books ; for, one at a 
time, when there was no hurrying bill to be paid, they 
had not seemed much to buy ; and in our brown room, 
where we sat every day, and where our ivies had kindly 
wonted themselves already to the broad, bright windows, 
there were stands and cases well filled, and a great round 
family table in the middle, whose worn cloth hid its shab- 
biness under the comfort of delicious volumes ready to 
the hand, among which, central of all, stood the Shekinah 
of the home-spirit, — a tall, large-globed lamp that. dre\V 
us cosily into its round of radiance every night. 

Not these June nights though. I will tell you presently 
what the June nights were at West over. 

We worked hard in those days, but we were right blithe 
about it. We had at last got an Irish girl from “far 
down,” — that is their word for the north country at home, 
and the north country is where the best material comer 
from, — who was willing to air her ignorance in our kitchen, 
and try our Christian patience, during a long pupilage, 
for the modest sum of three dollars a week ; than which 


20 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ she could not come indeed for less,” said the friend who 
brought her. “ All the girls was gettin’ that.” She had 
never seen dipped toast, and she “ could n’t do starched 
clothes very skilful ” ; but these things had nothing to do 
with established rates of wages. 

But who cared, when it was June, and the smell of 
green grass and the singing of birds were in the air, and 
everything indoors was clean, and fresh with the wonder- 
ful freshness of things set every one in a new place ? We 
worked hard and we made it look lovely, if the things 
were old ; and every now and then we stopped in the 
midst of a busy rush, at door or window, to see joyfully 
and exclaim with ecstasy how grandly and exquisitely 
Nature was furbishing up her beautiful old things also, — 
a million for one sweet touches outside, for ours in. 

“ Westover is no longer an adverbial phrase, even qual- 
ifying the verb ‘ to go,’ ” said Barbara, exultingly, looking 
abroad upon the family settlement, to which our new barn, 
rising up, added another building. '‘It is an undoubted 
substantive proper, and takes a preposition before it, except 
when it is in the nominative case.” 

Because of the cellar-kitchen, there was a high piazza 
built up to the sitting-room windows on the west, which 
gradually came to the ground-level along the front. Un- 
der this was the woodshed. The piazza was open, un- 
roofed : only at the front door was a wide covered portico, 
from which steps went down to the gravelled entrance. 
A light low railing ran around the whole. • 

Here we had those blessed country hours of day-done, 
when it was right and lawful to be openly idle in this 
world, and to look over through the beautiful evening 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


21 


glooms to neighbor worlds, that showed always a round of 
busy light, and yet seemed somehow to keep holiday-time 
with us, and to be only out at play in the spacious ether. 

We used to think of the sunset all the day through, 
wondering what new glory it would spread for us, and 
gathering eagerly to see, as for the witnessing of a pageant. 

The moon was young, for our first delight ; and the 
e't^^ning planet hung close by ; they dropped down through 



the gold together, till they touched the very rim of the 
farthest possible horizon ; when they slid silently beneath, 
we caught our suspended breath. 

“ But the curtain is n’t down,” said Barbara, after a 
hush. 


22 * WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 

No. The great scene was all open, still. Wide from 
north to south stretched the deep, sweet heaven, full of 
the tenderest tints and softliest creeping shadows ; the 
tree-fringes stood up against it ; the gentle winds swept 
through, as if creatures winged, invisible, went by ; 
touched, one by one, with glory, the stars burned on the 
blue ; we watched as if any new, unheard-of wonder might 
appear ; we looked out into great depths that narrow day- 
light shut us in from. Daylight was the curtain. 

“We Ve got the best balcony seats, have n’t we, 
father ? ” Barbara said again, coming to where Mr. 
Holabird sat, and leaning against the railing. 

“ The front row, and season tickets ! ” 

“ Every one, all summer. Only think ! ” said Ruth. 

“ Pho ! You ’ll get used to it,” answered Stephen, as 
if he knew human nature, and had got used himself to 
most things. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


23 


CHAPTER II. 

AMPHIBIOUS. 


HAT day of the month is it ? ’* 
asked Mrs. Holabird, looking up 
from her letter. 

Ruth told. 

“How do you always know 
the day of the month ? ” said 
Rosamond. “ You are as pat 
as the almanac. I have to stop 
and think whether anything par- 
ticular has happened, to remem- 
ber any day by, since the first, 
and then count up. So, as things 
don’t happen much out here, I ’m 
never sure of anything except 
that it can’t be more than the 
thirty-first ; and as to whether 
it can be that, I have to say over 
the old rhyme in my head.” 

“ I know how she tells,” spoke up Stephen. “ It ’s 
that thing up in her room, — that pious thing that whops 
over. It has the figures down at the bottom; and she 
whops it every morning.” 

Ruth laughed. 



24 


WE GIKLS; A HOME STOKY. 


“ What do you try to tease her for ? ” said Mrs. Hol- 
abird. 

“ It does n’t tease her. She thinks it ’s funny. She 
laughed, and you only puckered.” 

Ruth laughed again. “ It was n’t only that,” she 
said. 

“ Well, what then ? ” 

“ To think you knew.” 

“ Knew ! Why should n’t I know ? It ’s big enough.” 

‘‘Yes, — but about the whopping. And the figures 
are the smallest part of the difference. You ’re a pretty 
noticing boy, Steve.” 

Steve colored a little, and his eye twinkled. He saw 
that Ruth had caught him out. • 

“ I guess you set it for a goody-trap,” he said. “ Folks 
can’t help reading sign-boards when they go by. And 
besides, it ’s like the man that went to Van Amburgh’s. 
I shall catch you forgetting, some fine day, and then I ’ll 
whop the whole over for you.” 

Ruth had been mending stockings, and was just folding 
up the last pair. She did not say any more, for she did 
not want to tease Stephen in her turn; but there was a 
little quiet smile just under her lips that she kept from 
pulling too hard at the corners, as she got up and went 
away with them to her room. 

She stopped when she got to the open door of it, with 
her basket in her hand, and looked in from the threshold 
at the hanging scroll of Scripture texts printed in large 
clear letters, — a sheet for each day of the month, — and 
made to fold over and drop behind the black-walnut rod 
to which they were bound. It had been given her by 




WE GIELS; A HOME STORY. 25 

her teacher at the Bible Class, — Mrs. Ingleside ; and 
Ruth loved Mrs. Ingleside very much. 

Then she went to her bureau, and put her stockings 
in their drawer, and set the little basket, with its cotton- 
ball and darner, and maplewood egg, and small sharp 
scissors, on the top ; and then she went and sat down by 
the window, in her white considering-chair. 

For she had something to think about this morning. 

Ruth’s room had three doors. It was the middle room 
up stairs, in the beginning of the L. Mrs. Holabird’s 
opened into it from the front, and just opposite her door 
another led into the large, light corner room at the end, 
which Rosamond and Barbara occupied. Stephen’s was 
on the other side of the three-feet passage which led 
straight through from the front staircase to the back of 
the house. The front staircase was a broad, low-stepped, 
old-fashioned one, with a landing half-way up ; and it was 
from this landing that a branch half-flight came into the 
L, between these two smaller bedrooms. Now I have 
begun, I may as well tell you all about it ; for, if you are 
like me, you wdll be glad to be taken fairly into a house 
you are to pay a visit in, and find out all the pleasant- 
nesses of it, and whom they especially belong to. 

Ruth’s room was longest across the house, and Stephen’s 
with it ; behind his was only the space taken by some 
closets and the square of staircase beyond. This staircase 
had landings also, and was lighted by a window high up 
in the wall. Behind Ruth’s, as I have said, was the 
whole depth of a large apartment. But as the passage di- 
vided the L unequally, it gave the rooms similar space 
and shape, only at right angles to each other. 


26 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


The sun came into Stephen’s room in the morning, and 
into Ruth’s in the afternoon ; in the middle of the day the 
passage was one long shine, from its south window at the 
end, right through, — except in such days as these, that 
were too deep in the summer to bear it, and then the 
green blinds were shut all around, and the warm wind 
drew through pleasantly in a soft shade. 

When we brought our furniture from the house in the 
town, the large front rooms and the open halls used it up 
so, that it seemed as if there were hardly anything left 
but bedsteads and washstands and bureaus, — the very 
things that make up-stairs look so very bedroomy. And 
we wanted pretty places to sit in, as girls always do. Ros- 
amond and Barbara made a box-sofa, fitted luxuriously 
with old pew-cushions sewed together, and a crib mattress 
cut in two and fashioned into seat and pillows ; and a 
packing-case dressing-table, flounced with a skirt of white 
cross-barred muslin that Ruth had outgrown. In ex- 
change for this Ruth bargained for the dimity curtains 
that had furnished their two windows before, and would 
not do for the three they had now. 

Then she shut herself up one day in her room, and 
made them all go round by the hall and passage, back and 
forth ; and worked away mysteriously till the middle of 
the afternoon, when she unfastened all the doors again 
and set them wide, as they have for the most part re- 
mained ever since, in the daytimes ; thus rendering Ruth’s 
doings and ways particularly patent to the household, and 
most conveniently open to the privilege and second sight 
of story-telling. 

The white dimity curtains — one pair of them — were 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


27 


up at tlie wide west window ; the other pair was cut up 
and made over into three or four things, — drapery for a 
little old pine table that had come to light among attic 
lumber, upon which she had tacked it in neat plaitings 
around the sides, and overlapped it at the top with a plain 
hemmed cover of the same ; a great discarded toilet-cush- 
ion freshly encased with more of it, and edged with magic 
ruffling ; the stained top and tied-up leg of a little disabled 
teapoy, kindly disguised in uniform, — varied only with a 
narrow stripe of chintz trimming in crimson arabesque, — 
made pretty with piles of books, and the Scripture scroll 
hung above it with its crimson cord and tassels ; and in 
the window what she called afterward her “ considering- 
chair,” and in which she sat this morning; another antique, 
clothed purely from head to foot and made comfortable 
beneath with stout bagging nailed across, over the deficient 
cane- work. 

Tin tacks and some considerable machining — for moth- 
er had lent her the help of her little “ common sense ” 
awhile — had done it all ; and Ruth’s room, with its ob- 
long of carpet, — which Mrs. Holabird and she had made 
out before, from the brightest breadths of her old dove- 
colored one and a bordering of crimson Venetian, of which 
there had not been enough to put upon the staircase, — 
looked, as Barbara said, “just as if it had been done on 
purpose.” 

“ It %ay% it all, anyhow, does n’t it ? ” said Ruth. 

Ruth was delightedly satisfied with it, — with its situa- 
tion above all ; she liked to nestle in, in the midst of peo- 
ple ; and she never minded their coming through, any 
more than they minded her slipping her three little brass 
bolts when she had a desire to. 


28 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


She sat down in her considering-chair to-day, to think 
about Adelaide Marchbanks’s invitation. 

The two Marchbanks houses were veiy gay this sum- 
mer. The married daughter of one family — Mrs. Rey- 
bume — was at home from New York, and had brought 
a very fascinating young Mrs. Van Alstyne with her. 
Roger Marchbanks, at the other house, had a couple of 
college friends visiting him ; and both places were merry 
with young girls, — several sisters in each family, — 
always. The Haddens were there a good deal, and there 
were people from the city frequently, for a few days at a 
time. Mrs. Linceford was staying at the Haddens, and 
Leslie Goldthwaite, a great pet of hers, — Mr. Aaron 
Goldthwaite’s daughter, in the town, — was often up 
among them all. 

The Holabirds were asked in to tea-^innkings, and to 
croquet, now and then, especially at the Haddens’, whom 
they knew best ; but they were not on “ in and out ” 
terms, from morning to night, as these others were among 
themselves ; for one thing, the little daily duties of their 
life would not allow it. The “jolly times ” on the Hill 
were a kind of Elf-land to them, sometimes patent and 
free, sometimes shrouded in the impalpable and impassable 
mist that shuts in the fairy region when it wills to be by 
itself for a time. 

There was one little simple sesame which had a power 
this way for them, perhaps without their thinking of it ; 
certainly it was not spoken of directly when the invita- 
tions were given and accepted. Ruth’s fingers had a 
little easy, gladsome knack at music ; and I suppose some- 
times it was only Ruth herself who realized how thorough* 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


29 


ly the fingers earned the privilege of the rest of her bodily 
presence. She did not mind ; she was as happy playing 
as Rosamond and Barbara dancing ; it was all fair enough ; 
everybody must be wanted for something; and Ruth 
knew that her music was her best thing. She wished 
and meant it to be ; Ruth had plans in her head which 
her fingers were to carry out. 

But sometimes there was a slight flavor in attention, 
that was not quite palatable, even to Ruth’s pride. These 
three girls had each her own sort of dignity. Rosamond’s 
measured itself a good deal by the accepted dignity of 
others ; Barbara’s insisted on its own standard ; why 
should n’t they — the Holabirds — settle anything ? Ruth 
hated to have theirs hurt ; and she did not like subservi- 
ency, or courting favor. So this morning she was partly 
disturbed and partly puzzled by what had happened. 

Adelaide Marchbanks had overtaken her on the hill, on 
her way “ down street ” to do some errand, and had 
walked on with her very affably. At parting she had 
said to her, in an off-hand, by-the-way fashion, — 

“ Ruth, why won’t you come over to-night, and take 
tea? I should like you to hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing, 
and she would like your playing. TherS won’t be any 
company ; but we ’re having pretty good times now 
among ourselves.” 

Ruth knew what the “ no company ” meant ; just that 
there was no regular inviting, and so no slight in asking 
her alone, out of her family ; but she knew the March- 
banks parlors were always full of an evening, and that 
the usual set would be pretty sure to get together, and 
that the end of it all would be an impromptu German, for 


30 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


which she should play, and that the Marchbanks’s man 
would be sent home with her at eleven o’clock. 

She only thanked Adelaide, and said she “ did n’t 
know, — perhaps ; but she hardly thought she could 
to-night ; they had better not expect her,” and got away 
without promising. She was thinking it over now. 

She did not want to be stiff and disobliging ; and she 
would like to hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing. If it were 
only for herself, she would very likely think it a reasona- 
ble “ quid pro quo,” and modestly acknowledge that she 
had no claim to absolutely gratuitous compliment. She 
would remember higher reason, also, than the quid pro 
quo ; she would try to be glad in this little special “gift 
of ministering ” ; but it puzzled her about the others. 
How would they feel about it ? Would they like it, her 
being asked so ? W ould they think she ought to go ? 
And what if she were to get into this way of being asked 
alone ? — she the very youngest ; not “ in society ” yet 
even as much as Rose and Barbara ; though Barbara said 
they “ never ‘ came ’ out, — they just leaked out.” 

That was it ; that would not do ; she must not leak 
out, away from them, with her little waltz ripples ; if 
there were any small help or power of hers that could 
be counted in to make them all more valued, she would 
not take it from the family fund and let it be counted 
alone to her sole credit. It must go with theirs. It was 
little enough that she could repay into the household that 
had given itself to her like a born home. 

She thought she would not even ask Mrs. Holabird 
anything about it, as at first she meant to do. 

But Mrs. Holabird had a way of coining right into 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


31 


things. “We girls ” means Mrs. Holabird as much as 
anybody. It was always “ we girls ” in her heart, since 
girls' mothers never can quite lose the girl out of them- 
selves ; it only multiplies, and the “ everlasting nomina- 
tive ” turns into a plural. 

Ruth still sat in her white chair, with her cheek on 
her hand and her elbow on the window-ledge, looking 
out across the pleasant swell of grass to where they were 
cutting the first hay in old Mr. Holabird’s five-acre field, 
the click of the mowing-machine sounding like some new, 
gigantic kind of grasshopper, chirping its tremendous 
laziness upon the lazy air, when mother came in from the 
front hall, through her own room and saw her there. 

Mrs. Holabird never came through the rooms without 
a fresh thrill of pleasantness. Her home had expressed 
itself here, as it had never done anywhere else. There 
was something in the fair, open, sunshiny roominess and 
cosey connection of these apartments, hers and her 
daughters’, in harmony with the largeness and cheeriness 
and dearness in which her love and her wish for them 
held them always. 

It was more glad than grand ; and she aimed at no 
grandness ; but the generous space was almost splendid 
in its effect, as you looked through, especially to her who 
had lived and contrived in a spy-glass house ” so long. 

The doors right through from front to back, and the 
wide windows at either end and all the way, gave such 
sw’eep and light ; also the long mirrors, that had been 
from time unrememberable over the mantels in the 
town parlors, in the old, useless, horizontal style, and 
were here put, quite elegantly tall, — the one in Mrs. 


9(2 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Holabird’s room above her daintily appointed dressing- 
table (which was only two great square trunks full of 
blankets, that could not be stowed away anywhere else, 
dressed up in delicate-patterned chintz and set with her 
boxes and cushions and toilet-bottles), and the other, in 
“ the girls’ room,” opposite ; these made magnificent 
reflections and repetitions ; and at night, when they all 
lit their bed-candles, and vibrated back and forth with 
their last words before they shut their doors and subsided, 
gave a truly festival and illuminated air to the whole 
mansion ; so that Mrs. Roderick would often ask, when 
she came in of a morning in their busiest time, “ Did you 
have company last night ? I saw you were all lit up.” 

“We had one candle apiece,” Barbara would answer, 
very concisely. 

“ I do wish all our windows did n’t look Mrs. Roder- 
ick’s way,” Rosamond said once, after she had gone. 

“And that she didnH have to come through our 
clothes-yard of a Monday morning, to see just how many 
white skirts we have in the wash,” added Barbara. 

But this is off the track. 

“ What is it, Ruth ? ” asked Mrs. Holabird, as she 
came in upon the little figure in the white chair, midway 
in the long light through the open rooms. “ You did n’t 
really mind Stephen, did you ? ” 

“ O no, indeed, aunt ! I was only thinking out things. 
I believe I ’ve done, pretty nearly. I guess I sha’ n’t 
go. I wanted to make sure I was n’t provoked.” 

“You ’re talking from where you left off, are n’t you, 
Ruthie ? ” 

“ Yes, I guess so,” said Ruth, laughing. “ It seems 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


33 


like talking right on, — does n’t it ? — when you speak 
suddenly out of a ‘ think.’ I wonder what alone really 
means. It does n’t ever quite seem alone. Something 
thinks alongside always, or else you could n’t keep it up.” 

“ Are you making an essay on metaphysics ? You ’re 
a queer little Ruth.” 

“ Am I ? ” Ruth laughed again. “ I can’t help it. It 
does answer back.” 

“ And what was the answer about this time ? ” 

That was how Ruth came to let it out. 

“ About going over to the Marchbanks’s to-night. 
Don’t say anything, though. I thought they need n’t 
have asked me just to play. And they might have asked 
somebody with me. Of course it would have been as 
you said, if I ’d wanted to ; but I ’ve made up my mind 
I — need n’t. I mean, I knew right off that I didrCt^ 

Ruth did talk a funny idiom of her own when she 
came out of one of her thinks. But Mrs. Holabird un- 
derstood. Mothers get to understand the older idiom, 
just as they do baby-talk, — by the same heart-key. She 
knew that the “ need n’t ” and the “ did n’t ” referred to 
the “ wanting to.” 

. You see, I don’t think it would be a good plan to let 
them begin with me so.” 

“ You ’re a very sagacious little Ruth,” said Mrs. Hol- 
abird, affectionately. “ And a very generous one.” 

“ No, indeed ! ” Ruth exclaimed at that. “ I believe I 
think it ’s rather nice to settle that I can be contrary. I 
don’t like to be pat-a-caked.’’ 

She was glad, afterward, that Mrs. Holabird under 
stood. 


3 


34 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


The next morning Elinor Hadden and Leslie Gold- 
thwaite walked over, to ask the girls to go down into the 
wood-hollow to get azaleas. 

Rosamond and Ruth went. Barbara was busy: she 
was more apt to be the busy one of a morning than Rosa- 
mond ; not because Rosamond was not willing, but that 
when she was at leisure she looked as though she always 
had been and always expected to be ; she would have on 
a cambric morning-dress, and a jimpsey bit of an apron, 
and a pair of little fancy slippers, — (there was a secret 
about Rosamond’s slippers ; she had half a dozen different 
ways of getting them up, with braiding, and beading, and 
scraps of cloth and velvet ; and these tops would go on to 
any stray soles she could get hold of, that were more sole 
than body, in a way she only knew of ;) and she w’ould 
have the sitting-room at the last point of morning fresh- 
ness, — chairs and tables and books in the most charming 
relative positions, and every little leaf and flower in vase 
or basket just set as if it had so peeped up itself among the 
others, and all new-born to-day. So it was her gift to be 
ready and to receive. Barbara, if she really might have 
been dressed, would be as likely as not to be comfortable 
in a sack and skirt and her “points,” — as she called her 
black prunella shoes, that were weak at the heels and go- 
ing at the sides, and kept their original character only by 
these embellishments upon the instep, — and to have 
dumped herself down on the broad lower stair in the hall, 
just behind the green blinds of the front entrance, with a 
chapter to finish in some irresistible book, or a pair of 
stockings to mend. 

Rosamond was only thankful when she was behind the 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


35 


scenes and would stay there, not bouncing into the door- 
way from the dining-room, with unexpected little bobs, a 
cake-bowl in one hand and an egg-beater in the other, to 
get what she called “ grabs of conversation.” 

Of course she did not do this when the Marchbankses 
were there, or if Miss Pennington called ; but she could 
not resist the Haddens and Leslie Goldthwaite ; besides, 
“ they did have to make their own cake, and why should 
they be ashamed of it ? ” 

Rosamond would reply that “ they did have to make 
their own beds, but they could not bring them down stairs 
for parlor work.” 

“ That was true, and reason why : they just could n’t ; 
if they could, she would make up hers all over the house, 
just where there was the most fun. She hated pretences, 
and being fine.” 

Rosamond met the girls on the piazza to-day, when she 
saw them coming ; for Barbara was particularly awful at 
this moment, with a skimmer and a very red face, doing 
raspberries ; and she made them sit down there in the 
shaker chairs, while she ran to get her hat and boots, and 
to call Ruth ; and the first thing Barbara saw of them was 
from the kitchen window, “ slanting off ” down over the 
croquet-ground toward the big trees. 

Somebody overtook and joined them there, — somebody 
in a dark gray suit and bright buttons. 

“ Why, that,” cried Barbara, all to herself and her up- 
lifted skimmer, looking after them, — “ that must be the 
brother from West Point the Inglesides expected, — that 
young Dakie Thayne ! ” 

It was Dakie Thayne ; who, after they had all been in- 


36 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 



troduced and were walking on comfortably together, asked 
Ruth Holabird if it had not been she who had been ex- 
pected and wanted so badly last night at Mrs. March- 
banks’s ? 

Ruth dropped a little back as she walked with him, at 
the moment, behind the others, along the path between 
the chestnut-trees. 

“ I don’t think they quite expected me. I told Adelaide 
1 did not think I could come. I am the youngest, you 
see,” she said with a smile, “ and I don’t go out very 
much, except with my — cousins.” 

“ Your cousins ? I fancied you were all sisters.” 



WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


37 


“ It is all the same,’’ said Ruth. “ And that is why I 
always catch my breath a little before I say ‘ cousins.’ ” 

“ Could n’t they come ? What a pity ! ” pursued this 
young man, who seemed bent upon driving his questions 
home. 

“ O, it was n’t an invitation, you know. It was n’t 
company.” 

“ Was n’t it?” 

The inflection was almost imperceptible, and quite un- 
intentional ; Dakie Thayne was very polite ; but his eye- 
brows went up a little- — just a line or two — as he said 
it, the light beginning to come in upon him. 

Dakie had been about in the world somewhat ; his two 
years at West Point were not all his experience; and he 
knew what queer little wheels were turned sometimes. 

He had just come to Z (I must have a letter for 

my nameless town, and I have gone through the whole 
alphabet for it, and picked up a crooked stick at last), 
and the new group of people he had got among interested 
him. He liked problems and experiments. They were 
what he excelled in at the Military School. This was 
his first furlough ; and it was since his entrance at the 
Academy that his brother. Dr. Ingleside, had come to 

Z , to take the vacant practice of an old physician, 

disabled from continuing it. 

Dakie and Leslie Goldthwaite and Mrs. Ingleside were 
old friends ; almost as old as Mrs. Ingleside and the doc- 
tor. 

Ruth Holabird had a very young girl’s romance of ad- 
miration for one older, in her feeling toward Leslie. She 
had never known any one just like her ; and, in truth, 


38 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Leslie was different, in some things, from the little world 
of girls about her. In the “ each and all ” of their pretty 
groupings and pleasant relations she was like a bit of fresh, 
springing, delicate vine in a bouquet of bright, similarly 
beautiful flowers ; taking little free curves and reaches of 
her own, just as she had grown ; not tied, nor placed, nor 
constrained ; never the central or most brilliant thing ; but 
somehow a kind of life and grace that helped and touched 
and perfected all. 

There was something very re^l and individual about 
her ; she was no “ girl of the period,” made up by the 
fashion of the day. She would have grown just as a rose 
or a violet would, the same in the first quarter of the cen- 
tury or the third. They called her “ grandmotherly ” 
sometimes, when a certain quaint primitiveness that was 
in her showed itself. And yet she was the youngest girl 
in all that set, as to simpleness and freshness and unpre- 
tendingness, though she was in her twentieth year now, 
which sounds — did n’t somebody say so over my shoul- 
der ? — so very old ! Adelaide Marchbanks used to say of 
her that she had “ stayed fifteen.” 

She looked real. Her bright hair was gathered up 
loosely, with some graceful turn that showed its fine shin- 
ing strands had all been freshly dressed and handled, un- 
der a wide-meshed net that lay lightly around her head ; 
it was not packed and stuffed and matted and put on like 
a pad or bolster, from the bump of benevolence, all over 
that and everything else gentle and beautiful, down to the 
bend of her neck ; and her dress suggested always some 
one simple idea which you could trace through it, in its 
harmony, at a glance ; not complex and bewildering and 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


39 


fatiguing with its many parts and folds and festoonings 
and the garnishings of every one of these. She looked 
more as young women used to look before it took a lady 
with her dressmaker seven toilsome days to achieve a 
“ short street suit,” and the public promenades became 
the problems that they now are to the inquiring minds 
that are forced to wonder who stops at home and does up 
all the sewing, and where the hair all comes from. 

Some of the girls said, sometimes, that “ Leslie Gold- 
thwaite liked to be odd ; she took pains to be.” This 
was not true; she began with the prevailing fashion — 
the fundamental idea of it — always, when she had a new 
thing ; but she modified and curtailed, — something was 
sure to stop her somewhere ; and the trouble with the 
new fashions is that they never stop. To use a phrase 
she had picked up a few years ago, “ something always 
got crowded out.” She had other work to do, and she 
must choose the finishing that would take the shortest 
time ; or satin folds would cost six dollars more, and she 
wanted the money to use differently ; the dress was never 
the first and the must he ; so it came by natural develop- 
ment to express herself, not the rampant mode ; and her 
little ways of “ dodging the dressmaker,” as she called it, 
were sure to be graceful, as well as adroit and decided. 

It was a good thing for a girl like Ruth, just growing 
up to questions that had first come to this other girl of 
nineteen four years ago, that this other had so met them 
one by one, and decided them half unconsciously as she 
went along, that now, for the great puzzle of the “ out- 
side,” which is getting more and more between us and 
our real living, there was this one more visible, unobtru- 


40 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


sive answer put ready, and with such a charm of attrac* 
tiveness, into the world. 

Kuth walked behind her this morning, with Dakie 
Thayne, thinking how “ achy ” Elinor Hadden’s puffs and 
French-blue bands, and bits of embroidery looked, for 
the stitches somebody had put into them, and the weary 
starching and ironing and perking out that must be done 
for them, beside the simple hem and the one narrow 
basque ruffling of Leslie’s cambric morning-dress, which 
had its color and its set-off in itself, in the bright little 
carnations with brown stems that figured it. It was 
“trimmed in the piece”; and that was precisely what 
Leslie had said when she chose it. She “dodged” a 
great deal in the mere buying. 

Leslie and Ruth got together in the wood-hollow, 
where the little vines and ferns began. Leslie was quick 
to spy the bits of creeping Mitchella, and the wee feathery 
fronds that hid away their miniature grace under the feet 
of their taller sisters. They were so pretty to put in 
shells, and little straight tube-vases. Dakie Thayne 
helped Rose and Elinor to get the branches of white 
honeysuckle that grew higher up. 

Rose walked with the young cadet, the arms of both 
filled with the fragrant-flowering stems, as they came up 
homeward again. She was full of bright, pleasant chat. 
It just suited her to spend a morning so, as if there were 
no rooms to dust and no tables to set, in all the great 
sunshiny world ; but as if dews freshened everything, and 
furnishings “ came,” and she herself were clothed of the 
dawn and the breeze, like a flower. She never cared so 
much for afternoons, she said; of course one had got 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


41 


through with the prose by that time ; but “ to go off like 
a bird or a bee right after breakfast, — that was living ; 
that was the Irishman’s blessing, — ‘ the top o’ the morn- 
in’ till yez ! ’ ” 

“ Won’t you come in and have some lunch?” she 
asked, with the most magnificent intrepidity, when she 
had n’t the least idea what there would be to give them 
all if they did, as they came round under the piazza base- 
ment, and up to the front portico. 

They thanked her, no ; they must get home with their 
flowers ; and Mrs. Ingleside expected Dakie to an early 
dinner. 

Upon which she bade them good by, standing among 
her great azalea branches, and looking ‘‘ awfully pretty,” 
as Dakie Thayne said afterward, precisely as if she had 
nothing else to think of. 

The instant they had fairly moved aw^ay, she turned 
and ran in, in a hurry to look after the salt-cellars, and to 
see that Katty had n’t got the table-cloth diagonal to the 
square of the room instead of parallel, or committed any 
of the other general-housework horrors which she de- 
tailed herself on daily duty to prevent. 

Barbara stood behind the blind. 

“ The audacity of that ! ” she cried, as Rosamond came 
in. “I shook right out of my points when I heard you ! 
Old Mrs. Lovett has been here, and has eaten up exactly 
the last slice of cake but one. So that ’s Dakie Thayne ? ” 

“ Yes. He ’s a nice little fellow. Are n’t these lovely 
flowers ? ” 

“ O my gracious ! that great six-foot cadet ! ” 

“ It does n’t matter about the feet. He ’s barely eigh 
•^en. But he ’s nice, — ever so nice.” 


42 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ It ’s a case of Outledge, Leslie,” Dakie Tliayne said, 
going down the hill. “ They treat those girls — amphib- 
iously ! ” 

“ Well,” returned Leslie, laughing, “Z’w amphibious. 
I live in the town, and I can come out — and not die — 
on the Hill. I like it. I always thought that kind of 
animal had the nicest time.” 

They met Alice Marchbanks with her cousin Maud, 
coming up. 

“We ’ve been to see the Holabirds,” said Dakie 
Thayne, right off. 

“ I wonder why that little Ruth did n’t come last night ? 
We really wanted her,” said Alice to Leslie Goldthwaite. 

“ For batrachian reasons, I believe,” put in Dakie, full 
of fun. “ She is n’t quite amphibious yet. She don’t 
come out from under water. That is, she ’s young, and 
does n’t go alone. She told me so.” 

You need n’t keep asking how we know ! Things 
that belong get together. People who tell a story see 
round corners. 

The next morning Maud Marchbanks came over, and 
asked us all to play croquet and drink tea with them that 
evening, with the Goldthwaites and the Haddens. 

“We’re growing very gay and multitudinous,” she 
said, graciously. 

“ The midshipman ’s got home, — Harry Goldthwaite, 
you know.” 

Ruth was glad, then, that mother knew ; she had the 
girls’ pride in her own keeping ; there was no responsi- 
bility of telling or withholding. But she was glad also 
that she had not gone last night. 


WE GIELS: A HOME STORY. 


43 


When we went up stairs at bedtime, Eosamond asked 
Barbara the old, inevitable question, — 

“ What have you got to wear, Barb, to-morrow night, — 
that ’s ready ? ” 

And Barbara gave, in substance, the usual unperturbed 
answer, “Not a dud ! ” 

But Mrs. Holabird kept a garnet and white striped silk 
skirt on purpose to lend to Barbara. If she had given it, 
there would have been the end. And among us there 
would generally be a muslin waist, and perhaps an over- 
skirt. Barbara said our “ overskirts ” were skirts that 
were over with^ before the new fashion came. 

Barbara went to bed like a chicken, sure that in the big 
world to-morrow there would be something that she could 
pick up. 

It was a miserable plan, perhaps ; but it was one of our 
ways at Westover. 


44 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


CHAPTER III. 

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN. 

HREE things came of the March- 
banks’s party for us Holabirds. 

Mrs. Van Alstyne took a great 
fancy to Rosamond. 

Harry Goldthwaite put a new 
idea into Barbara’s head. 

And Ruth’s little undeveloped 
plans, which the facile fingers 
were to carry out, received a 
fresh and sudden impetus. 

You have thus the three heads 
of the present chapter. 

Hew could any one help tak- 
ing a fancy to Rosamond Hola- 
6ird ? In the first place, as 
Mrs. Van Alstyne said, there 
was the name, — “a making for 
anybody ” ; for names do go a 
great way, 'notwithstanding Shakespeare. 

It made /ou think of everything springing and singing 
and blooming and sweet. Its expression was “ blossomy, 
nigbtingale-y ” ; atilt with glee and grace. And that was 
\he way she looked and seemed. If you spoke to her 



WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


45 


suddenly, the head turned as a bird’s does, with a small, 
shy, all-alive movement ; and the bright eye glanced up 
at you, ready to catch electric meanings from your own. 
When she talked to you in return, she talked all over ; 
with quiet, refined radiations of life and pleasure in each 
involuntary turn and gesture ; the blossom of her face 
lifted and swayed like that of a fiower delicately poised 
upon its stalk. She was like a flower chatting with a 
breeze. 

She forgot altogether, as a present fact, that she looked 
pretty ; but she had known it once, when she dressed her- 
self, and been glad of it; and something lasted from the 
gladness just enough to keep out of her head any painful, 
conscious question of how she was seeming. That, and 
her innate sense of things proper and refined, made her 
manners what Mrs. Van Alstyne pronounced them, — 
“ exquisite.” 

That was all Mrs. Van Alstyne waited to find out. 
She did not go deep ; hence she took quick fancies or dis- 
likes, and a great many of them. 

She got Rosamond over into a corner with herself, and 
they had everybody round them. All the people in the 
room were saying how lovely Miss Holabird looked to- 
night. For a little while that seemed a great and beautiful 
thing. I don’t know whether it was or not. It was 
pleasant to have them find it out; but she would have 
been just as lovely if they had not. Is a party so very 
particular a thing to be lovely in ? I wonder what makes 
the difference. She might have stood on that same square 
of the Turkey carpet the next day and been just as pretty. 
But, somehow, it seemed grand in the eyes of us girls, 


46 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


and it meant a great deal that it would not mean the n^xt 
day, to have her stand right there, and look just so, to- 
night. 

In the midst of it all, though, Ruth saw something that 
seemed to her grander, — another girl, in another corner, 
looking on, — a girl with a very homely face ; somebody’s 
cousin, brought with them there. She looked pleased and 
self-forgetful, differently from Rose in her prettiness ; she 
looked as if she had put herself away, comfortably satis' 
fied ; this one looked as if there were no self put away 
anywhere. Ruth turned round to Leslie Goldthwaite, 
who stood by. 

“I do think,” she said, — “don’t you? — it’s just the 
bravest and strongest thing in the world to be awfully 
homely, and to know it, and to go right on and have a 
good time just the same ; — every day^ you see, right 
through everything ! I think such people must be splen- 
did inside ! ” 

“ The most splendid person I almost ever knew was 
like that,” said Leslie. “And she was fifty years old 
too.” 

“ 'W'ell,” said Ruth, drawing a girl’s long breath at the 
fifty years, “ it was pretty much over then, was n’t it ? 
But t think I should like — just once — to look beautiful 
at a party ! ” 

The best of it for Barbara had been on the lawn, before 

tea. 

Barbara was a magnificent croquet-player. She and 
Harry Goldthwaite were on one side, and they led off 
their whole party, going nonchalantly through wicket after 
wicket, as if they could not help it ; and after they had 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


47 


well distanced the rest, just toling each other along over 
the ground, till they were rovers together, and came down 
into the general field again with havoc to the enemy, and 
the whole game in their hands on their own part. 

“ It was a handsome thing to see, for once,’’ Dakie 
Thayne said ; “ hut they might make much of it, for it 
would n’t do to let them play on the same side again.” 

It was while they were off, apart down the slope, just 
croqueted away for the time, to come up again with tre- 
mendous charge presently, that Harry asked her if sho 
knew the game of “ ship-coil.” 



48 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Barbara shook her head. What was it ? 

“ It is a pretty thing. The officers of a Russian frigate 
showed it to us. They play it with rings made of spliced 
rope ; we had them plain enough, but you might make 
them as gay as you liked. There are ten rings, and each 
player throws them all at each turn. The object is to 
string them up over a stake, from which you stand at a 
certain distance. Whatever number you make counts up 
for your side, and you play as many rounds as you may 
agree upon.’’ 

Barbara thought a minute, and then looked up quickly. 

“ Have you told anybody else of that ? ” 

“ Not here. I have n’t thought of it for a good while.” 

“ Would you just please, then,” said Barbara in a hur- 
ry, as somebody came down toward them in pursuit of a 
ball, “ to hush up, and let me have it all to myself for a 
while ? And then,” she added, as the stmy ball was 
driven up the lawn again, and the player went away after 
it, “ come some day and help us get it up at .Westover? 
It s such a thing, 'you see, to get anything that ’s new.” 

“ I see. To be sure. You shall have the State 
Right, — is n’t that what they make over for patent con- 
cerns ? And we ’ll have something famous out of it. 
They ’re getting tired of croquet, or thinking they ought 
to be, which is the same thing.” It was Barbara’s turn 
now ; she hit Harry Goldthwaite’s ball with one of her 
precise little taps, and, putting the two beside each other 
with her mallet, sent them up rollicking into the thick of 
the fight, where the final hand-to-hand struggle was taking 
place between the last two wickets and the stake. Every- 
body was there in a bunch when she came ; in a minute 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


49 


everybody of the opposing party was everywhere else, and 
she and Harry had it between them again. She played 
out two balls, and then^ accidentally, her own. After one 
“ distant, random gun,” from the discomfited foe, Harry 
rolled quietly up against the wand, and the game was 
over. 

It was then and there that a frank, hearty liking and 
alliance was rC'estahlished between Harry Goldthwaite 
and Barbara, upon an old remembered basis of ten years 
ago, when he had gone away to school and given her half 
his marbles for a parting keepsake, — “as he might have 
done,” we told her, “ to any other boy.” 

“ Ruth has n’t had a good time,” said mother, softly, 
standing in her door, looking through at the girls laying 
away ribbons and pulling down hair, and chattering as 
only girls in their teens do chatter at bedtime. 

Ruth was in her white window-chair, one foot up on a 
cricket ; and, as if she could not get into that place with- 
out her considering-fit coming over her, she sat with her 
one unlaced boot in her hand, and her eyes away out over 
the moonlighted fields. 

“ She played all the evening, nearly. She always 
does,” said Barbara. 

“ Why, I had a splendid time ! ” cried Ruth, coming 
down upon them out of her cloud with flat contradiction. 
“ And I ’m sure I did n’t play all the evening. Mrs. Van 
Alstyne sang Tennyson’s ‘ Brook,’ aunt ; and the music 
splashes so in it ! It did really seem as if she were spat- 
tering it all over the room, and it was n"’t a bit of matter ! ” 

“ The time was so good, then, that it has made you so- 
ber,” said Mrs. Holabird, coming and putting her hand on 
4 . 


50 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


the back of the white chair. “ I ’ve known good times do 
that.” 

“ It has given me ever so much thinking to do ; besides 
that brook in my head, ‘ going on forever — ever ! ^o-ing- 
on-forever ! ’ ” And Ruth broke into the joyous refrain 
of the song as she ended. 

“ I shall come to you for a great long talk to-morrow 
morning, mother ! ” Ruth said again, turning her head 
and touching her lips to the mother-hand on her chair. 
She did not always say ‘‘mother,” you see; it was only 
when she wanted a very dear word. 

“We ’ll wind the rings with all the pretty -colored stuffs 
we can find in the bottomless piece-bag,” Barbara was 
saying, at the same moment, in the room beyond. “ And 
you can bring out your old ribbon-box for the bowing-up, 
Rosamond. It’s a charity to clear out your glory-holes 
once in a while. It ’s going to be just — splend-umphant ! ” 

“ If you don ’t go and talk about it,” said Rosamond. 
“ We mu%t keep the new of it to ourselves.” 

“ As if I needed I ” cried Barbara, indignantly. “ When 
I hushed up Harry Goldthwaite, and went round all the 
rest of the evening without doing anything but just give 
you that awful little pinch ! ” 

“ That was bad enough,” said Rosamond, quietly; she 
never got cross or inelegantly excited about anything. 
“But I do think the girls will like it. And we might 
have tea out on the broad piazza.” 

“That is bare floor too,” said Barbara, mischievously. 

Now, our dining-room had not yet even the English 
drugget. The dark new boards would do for summer 
weather, mother said. “ If it had been real oak, polished ! ” 
Rosamond thought. “ But hard-pine was kitcheny.” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY, 


51 


Ruth, went to bed with the rest of her thinking and the 
brook-music flittering in her brain. 

Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks had talked behind her with 
Jeannie Hadden about her playing. It was not the com- 
pliment that excited her so, although they said her touch 
and expression were wonderful, and that her fingers were 
like little flying magnets, that could n’t miss the right 
points. Jeannie Hadden said she liked to see Ruth Hola- 
bird play, as well as she did to hear her. 

But it was Mrs. Marchbanks’s saying that she would 
give almost anything to have Lily taught such a style ; 
she hardly knew what she should do with her ; there was 
no good teacher in the town who gave lessons at the 
houses, and Lily was not strong enough to go regularly to 
Mr. Viertelnote. Besides, she had picked up a story of 
his being cross, and rapping somebody’s fingers, and Lily 
was very shy and sensitive. She never did herself any 
justice if she began to be afraid. 

Jeannie Hadden said it was just her mother’s trouble 
about Reba, except that Reba was strong enough ; only 
that Mrs. Hadden preferred a teacher to come to the 
house. 

“ A good young-lady teacher, to give beginners a de- 
sirable style from the very first, is exceedingly needed 
since Miss Robbyns went away,” said Mrs. Marchbanks, 
to whom just then her sister came and said something, and 
drew her off. 

Ruth’s fingers flew over the keys ; and it must have 
been magnetism that guided them, for in her brain quite 
other quick notes were struck, and ringing out a busy 
chime of their own. 


52 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ If I only could ! ” she was saying to herself. “ If 
they really would have me, and they would let me at 
home. Then I could go to Mr. Viertelnote. I think I 
could do it ! I ’m almost sure ! I could show anybody 
what I know, — and if they like that I ” 

It went over and over now, as she lay wakeful in bed, 
mixed up with the “ forever — ever,” and the dropping 
tinkle of that lovely trembling ripple of accompaniment, 
until the late moon got round to the south and slanted in 
between the white dimity curtains, and set a glimmering 
little ghost in the arm-chair. 

Ruth came down late to breakfast. 

Barbara was pushing back her chair. 

“ Mother, — or anybody ! Do you want any errand 
down in town ? I’m going out for a stramble. A party 
always has to be walked off next morning.” 

“ And talked off, does n’t it ? I ’m afraid my errand 
would need to be with Mrs. Goldthwaite or Mrs. Hadden, 
would n’t it ? ” 

“ Well, I dare say I shall go in and see Leslie. Rosa- 
mond, why can’t you come too ? It ’s a sort of nuisance 
that boy having come home ! ” 

“ That ‘ great six-foot lieutenant ’ ! ” parodied Rose. 

“ I don’t care ! You said feet did n’t signify. And he 
used to be a boy, when we played with him so.” 

“ I suppose they all used to be,” said Rose, demurely. 

“ Well, I won’t go ! Because the truth is I did want 
to see him, about those — patent rights. I dare say they ’1\ 
come up.” 

“ I ’ve no doubt,” said Rosamond. 

“I wish you would both go away somewhere,” said 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


53 


Ruth, as Mrs. Holabird gave her her coffee. “ Because I 
and mother have got a secret, and I know she wants her 
last little hot corner of toast.” 

“ I think you are likely to get the last little cold corner,” 
said Mrs. Holabird, as Ruth sat, forgetting her plate, after 
the other girls had gone away. 

“ I ’m thinking, mother, of a real warm little corner I 
Something that would just fit in and make everything so 
nice. It was put into my head last night, and I think it 
was sent on purpose ; it came right up behind me so. 
Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks and Jeannie Hadden praised my 
playing ; more than I could tell you, really ; and Mrs. 
Marchbanks wants a — ” Ruth stopped, and laughed at 
the word that was coming — “ ?ac?7/-teacher for Lily, and 
so does Mrs. Hadden for Reba. There, mother. It ’s in 
your head now! Please turn it over with a nice little 
think, and tell me you would just as lief, and that you 
believe perhaps I could I ” 

By this time Ruth was round behind Mrs. Holabird’s 
chair, with her two hands laid against her cheeks. Mrs. 
Holabird leaned her face down upon one of the hands, 
holding it so, caressingly. 

“I am sure you could, Ruthie. But I am sure I 
wouldn't just as lief! I would liefer you should have all 
you need without.” 

“I know that, mother. But it wouldn’t be half so 
good for me ! ” 

“ That ’s something horrid, I know ! ” exclaimed Bar- 
bara, coming in upon the last word. “ It always is, when 
people talk about its being good for them. It ’s sure to 
be salts or senna, and most likely both.” 


54 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


“ O dear me ! said Ruth, suddenly seized with a i.ew 
perception' of difficulty. Until now, she had only been 
considering whether she could, and if Mrs. Holabird would 
approve. Don't you — or Rose — call it names, Bar- 
bara, please, will you ? ” 

“ Which of us are you most afraid of? For Rosa- 
mond’s salts and senna areu different from mine, pretty 
often. I guess it ’s hers this time, by your putting her in 
that anxious parenthesis.” 

“ I ’m afraid of your fun, Barbara, and I ’m afraid of 
Rosamond’s — ” 

“ Earnest? Well, that is much the more frightful. It 
is so awfully quiet and pretty-behaved and positive. But 
if you ’re going to retain me on your side, you ’ll have to 
lay the case before me, you know, and give me a fee. 
You need n’t stand there, bribing the judge beforehand.” 

Ruth turned right round and kissed Barbara. 

“ I want you to go with me and see if Mrs. Hadden 
and Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks would let me teach the 
children.” 

“ Teach the children ! What? ” 

“ O, music, of course. That ’s all I know, pretty much. 
And — make Rose understand.” 

“ Ruth, you ’re a duck ! I like you for it ! But I ’m 
not sure I like it." 

“ Will you do just those two things ? ” 

“ It ’s a beautiful programme. But suppose we leave 
out the first part ? I think you could do that alone. It 
would spoil it if I went. It ’s such a nice little spontane- 
ous idea of your own, you see. But if we made it a reg- 
ular family delegation — besides, it will take as much as 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


55 


all me to manage the second. Rosamond is very ele- 
gant to-day. Last night’s twilight is n’t over. And it ’s 
funny we Ve plans too ; we ’re going to give lessons, — 
differently ; we ’re going to lead off, for once, — we Hol- 
abirds ; and I don’t know exactly how the music will 
chime in. It may make things — Holabirdy.” 

Rosamond had true perceptions, and she was consci- 
entious. What she said, therefore, when she was told, 
was, — 

“ O dear ! I suppose it is right ! But — just now ! 
Right things do come in so terribly askew, like good old 
Mr. Isosceles, sidling up the broad aisle of a Sunday I 
Could n’t you wait awhile, Ruth ? ” 

“ And then somebody else would get the chance.” 

“ There ’s nobody else to be had.” 

“ Nobody knows till somebody starts up. They don’t 
know there ’s me to be had yet.” 

“ O Ruth ! Don’t offer to teach grammar, anyhow ! ” 

“ I don’t know. I might. I should n’t teach it ‘ any- 
how.’ ” 

Ruth went off, laughing, happy. She knew she had 
gamed the home-half of her point. 

Her heart beat a good deal, though, when she went into 
Mrs. Marchbanks’s library alone, and sat Avaiting for the 
lady to come down. 

She would rather have gone to Mrs. Hadden first, who 
was very kind and old-fashioned, and not so overpower- 
ingly grand. But she had her justification for her attempt 
from Mrs. Marchbanks’s own lips, and she must take up 
her opportunity as it came to her, following her clew right 
end first. She meant simply to tell Mrs. Marchbanks ho\< 
she had happened to think of it. 


56 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Good morning,” said the great lady, graciously, won- 
dering not a little what had brought the child, in this un- 
ceremonious early fashion, to ask for her. 

“ I came,” said Ruth, after she had answered the good 
morning, “ because 1 heard what you were so kind as to 
say last night about liking my playing ; and that you had 
nobody just now to teach Lily. I thought, perhaps, you 
might be willing to try me ; for I should like to do it, and 
I think I could show her all I know ; and then I could 
take lessons myself of Mr. Viertelnote. I ’ve been think- 
ing about it all night.” 

Ruth Holabird had a direct little fashion of going 
straight through whatever crust of outside appearance to 
that which must respond to what she had at the moment 
in herself. She had real self-possession ; because she did 
not let herself be magnetized into a false consciousness of 
somebody else’s self, and think and speak according to 
their notions of things, or her reflected notion of what 
they would think of her. She was different from Rosa- 
mond in this ; Rosamond could not help feeling her 
double^ — Mrs. Grundy’s “idea” of her. That was what 
Rosamond said herself about it, when Ruth told it all at 
home. 

The response is almost always there to those who go for 
it ; if it is not, there is no use any way. 

Mrs. Marchbanks smiled. 

“ Does Mrs. Holabird know ? ” 

“ O yes ; she always knows.” 

There was a little distance and a touch of business in 
Mrs. Marchbanks’s manner after this. The child’s own 
impulse had been very frank and amusing ; an authorized 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


57 


seeking of employment was somewhat different. Still, 
she was kind enough ; the impression had been made ; 
perhaps Rosamond, with her “just now ” feeling, would 
have been sensitive to what did not touch Ruth, at the 
moment, at all. 

“But you see, my dear, that ^our having a pupil could 
not be quite equal to Mr. Viertelnote’s doing the same 
thing. I mean the one would not quite provide for the 
other.” 

“ O no, indeed ! I ’m in hopes to have two. I mean 
to go and see Mrs. Hadden about Reba ; and then I might 
begin first, you know. If I could teach two quarters, I 
could take one.” 

“ You have thought it all over. You are quite a little 
business woman. Now let us see. I do like your play- 
ing, [Ruth. I think you have really a charming style. 
But whether you could impart it, — that is a different 
capacity.” 

“ I am pretty good at showing how,” said Ruth. “I 
think I could make her understand all I do.” 

‘‘ Well ; I should be willing to pay twenty dollars a 
quarter to any lady who would bring Lily forward to 
where you are ; if you can do it, I will pay it to you. 
If Mrs. Hadden will do the same, you will have two 
thirds of Viertelnote’s price.” 

“ 0, that is so nice ! ” said Ruth, gratefully. “ Then 
in half a quarter I could begin. And perhaps in that 
time I might get another.” 

“ I shall be exceedingly interested in your getting 
on,” said Mrs. ^archbanks, as Ruth arose to go. She 
said it very much as she might have said it to anybody 


58 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


who was going to try to earn money, and whom she 
meant to patronize. But Ruth took it singly ; she was 
not two persons, — one who asked for work and pay, and 
another who expected to be treated as if she were privi- 
leged above either. She was quite intent upon her pur- 
pose. 

If Mrs. Marchbanks had been patron kind, Mrs. Had- 
den was motherly so. 

‘‘ You ’re a dear little thing ! When will you begin ? 
said she. 

Ruth’s morning was a grand success. She came home 
with a rapid step, springing to a soundless rhythm. 

She found Rosamond and Barbara and Harry Gold- 
thwaite on the piazza, winding the rope rings with blue 
and scarlet and white and purple, and tying them with 
knots of ribbon. ^ 

Harry had been prompt enough. He had got the rope, 
and spliced it up himself, that morning, and had brought 
the ten rings over, hanging upon his arms like bangles. 

They were still busy when dinner was ready; and Harry 
stayed at the first asking. 

It was a scrub-day in the kitchen ; and Katty came in 
to take the plates with her sleeves rolled up, a smooch of 
stove-polish across her arm, and a very indiscriminate- 
colored apron. She put one plate upon another in a hur- 
ry, over knives and forks and remnants, clattered a good 
deal, and dropped the salt-spoons. 

Rosamond colored and frowned ; but talked with a most 
resolutely beautiful repose. 

Afterward, when it was all over, and Harry had gone, 
promising to come next day and bring a stake, painted 


WE GIKLS: A HOME STORY. 


59 


vermilion and white, with a little gilt ball on the top of it, 
she sat by the ivied window in the brown room with tears 
in her eyes. 

“ It is dreadful to live so ! ” she said, with real feeling. 
“ To have just one wretched girl to do everything ! ” 

“ Especially,’^ said Barbara, without much mere}’’, “ when 
she always will do it at dinner-time.” 

“ It ’s the betwixt and between that I can’t bear,” said 
Rose. “ To have to do with people like the Penningtons 
and the Marchbankses, and to see their ways ; to sit at 
tables where there is noiseless and perfect serving, and to 
know that they think it is the ‘ mainspring of life ’ (that ’s 
just what Mrs. Van Alstyne said about it the other day) ; 
and then to have to hitch on so ourselves, knowing just 
as well what ought to be as she does, — it ’s too bad. It ’s 
doul^l^ dealing. I ’d rather not know, or pretend any 
better. I do wish we belonged somewhere ! ” 

Ruth felt sorry. She always did when "Rosamond was 
hurt with these things. She knew it came from a very 
pure, nice sense of what was beautiful, and a thoroughness 
of desire for it. She knew she wanted it every day^ and 
that nobody hated shams, or company contrivances, more 
heartily. She took great trouble for it ; so that when 
they were quite alone, and Rosamond could manage, 
things often went better than when guests came and di- 
vided her attention. 

Ruth went over to where she sat. 

“ Rose, perhaps we do belong just here. Somebody has 
got to be in the shading-off, you know. That helps both 
ways.” 

“ It ’s a miserable indefiniteness, though.” 


O'O 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


“ No, it is n’t,” said Barbara, quickly. “ It’s a good 
plan, and I like it. Ruth just hits it. I see now what 
they mean by ‘ drawing lines.’ You can’t draw them any- 
where but in the middle of the stripes. And people that 
are right in the middle have to ‘ toe the mark.’ It ’s the 
edge, after all. You can reach a great deal farther by be- 
ing betwixt and between. And one girl need n’t always 
be black-leaded, nor drop all the spoons.’^ 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


63 


CHAPTER IV. 


NEXT THINGS. 



OSAMOND’S ship-coil party was 
. a great success. It resolved it- 
self into Rosamond’s party, al- 
though Barbara had had the first 
thought of it ; for Rosamond 
quietly took the management of 
all that was to be delicately and 
gracefully arranged, and to have 
the true tone of high propriety. 

Barbara made the little white 
rolls ; Rosamond and Ruth beat 
up the cake ; mother attended to 
the boiling of the tongues, and, 
when it was time, to the making 
of the delicious coffee ; all to- 
gether we gave all sorts of pleas- 
ant touches to the brown room, 
and set the round table (the old 
cover could be “ shied ” out of sight now, as Stephen said, 
and replaced with the white glistening damask for the tea) 
in the corner between the southwest windows that opened 
upon the broad piazza. 

’ The table was bright with pretty silver — not too much 


62 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


— and best glass and delicate porcelain with a tiny thread 
of gold ; and the rolls and the thin strips of tongue cut 
lengthwise, so rich and tender that a fork could manage 
them, and the large raspberries, black and red and white, 
were upon plates and dishes of real Indian, white and 
golden brown. 

The wide sashes were thrown up, and there were light 
chairs outside ; Mrs. Holabird would give the guests tea 
and coffee, and Ruth and Barbara would sit in the window- 
seats and do the waiting, back and forth, and Dakie 
Thayne and Harry Goldthwaite would help. 

Katty held her office as a sinecure that day; looked on 
admiringly, forgot half her regular work, felt as if she had 
somehow done wonders without realizing the process, and 
pronounced that it was “ no throuble at ahl to have com- 
pany.” 

But before the tea was the new game. 

It was a bold stroke for us Holabird s. Originating was 
usually done higher up ; as the Papal Council gives forth 
new spiritual inventions for the joyful acceptance of be- 
lievers, who may by no means invent in their turn and 
offer to the Council. One could hardly tell how it would 
fall out, — whether the Haddens and the Marchbankses 
would take to it, or whether it would drop right there. . 

“ They may ‘ take it off your hands, my dear,’ ” sug- 
gested the remorseless Barbara. Somebody had offered 
to do that once for Mrs. Holabird, when her husband had 
had an interest in a ship in the Baltic trade, and some furs 
had come home, richer than we had quite expected. 

Rose was loftily silent ; she would not have mid that to 
her very self; but she had her little quiet instincts of 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


63 


holding on, — through Harry Goldthwaite, chiefly; it 
was his novelty. 

Does this seem very bare worldly scheming among 
young girls who should simply have been having a good 
time? We should not tell you if we did not know; it 
begins right there among them, in just such things as these ; 
and our day and our life are full of it. 

The Marchbanks set had a way of taking things oiF 
people’s hands, as soon as they were proved worth while. 
People like the Holabirds could not be taking this pains 
every day ; making their cakes and their coffee, and setting 
their tea-table in their parlor ; putting aside all that was 
shabby or inadequate, for a few special hours, and turning 
all the family resources upon a point, to serve an occasion. 
But if anything new or bright were so produced that 
could be transplanted, it was so easy to receive it among 
the established and every-day elegances of a freer living, 
give it a wider introduction, and so adopt and repeat and 
centralize it that the originators should fairlj^" forget they 
had ever begun it. And why would not this be honor 
enough ? Invention must always pass over to the capital 
that can handle it. 

The new game charmed them all. The girls had the 
best of it, for the young men always gathered up the rings 
and brought them to each in turn. It was very pretty to 
receive both hands full of the gayly wreathed and knotted 
hoops, to hold them slidden along one arm like garlands, 
to pass them lightly from hand to hand again, and to toss 
them one by one through the air with a motion of more or 
less inevitable grace ; and the excitement of hope or of 
success grew with each succeeding trial. 


6^4 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


They could not help liking it, even the most fastidious ; 
they might venture upon liking it, for it was a game with 
an origin and references. It was an officers’ game, on 
board great naval ships ; it had proper and sufficient ante- 
cedents. It would do. 

By the time they stopped playing in the twilight, and 
went up the wide end steps upon the deep, open platform, 
where coffee and biscuits began to be fragrant, Rosamond 
knew that her party was as nice as if it had been any- 
body’s else whoever ; that they were all having as gen- 
uinely good a time as if they had not come “ westover” 
to get it. 

And everybody does like a delicious tea, such as is far 
more sure and very different from hands like Mrs. Hola- 
bird’s and her daughters, than from those of a city confec- 
tioner and the most professed of private cooks. 

It all went off and ended in a glory, — the glory of the 
sun pouring great backward floods of light and color all 
up to the summer zenith, and of the softly falling and 
changing shade, and the slow forth-coming of the stars : 
and Ruth gave them music, and by and by they had a 
little German, out there on the long, wide esplanade. It 
was the one magnificence of their house, — this high, spa- 
cious terrace ; Rosamond was thankful every day that 
Grandfather Holabird had to build the wood-house under 
it. 

After this, Westover began to grow to be more of a 
centre than our home, cheery and full of girl-life as it 
was, had ever been able to become before. 

They might have transplanted the game, — they did 
take slips from it, — and we might not always have had 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


65 


tickets to our own play ; but they could not transplant 
Harry Goldthwaite and Dakie Thayne. They would 
come over, nearly every day, at morning or evening, and 
practise “ coil,” or make some other plan or errand ; and 
so there came to be always something going on at the 
Holabirds’, and if the other girls wanted it, they had to 
come where it was. 

Mrs. Van Alstyne came often ; Rosamond grew very 
intimate with her. 

Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks did say, one day, that she 
thought “the Holabirds were slightly mistaking their 
position ” ; but the remark did not come round, westover, 
till long afterward, and meanwhile the position remained 
the same. 

It was right in the midst of all this that Ruth aston- 
ished the family again, one evening. 

“ I wish,” she said, suddenly, just as if she were not 
suggesting something utterly incongruous and disastrous, 
“ that we could ask Lucilla Waters up here for a little 
visit.” 

The girls had a way, in Z — , of spending two or three 
days together at each other’s houses, neighbors though 
they were, within easy reach, and seeing each other 
almost constantly. Leslie Goldthwaite came up to the 
Haddens’, or they went down to the Goldthwaites’. The 
Haddens would stay over night at the Marchbanks’, and 
on through the next day, and over night again. There 
were, indeed, three recognized degrees of intimacy : that 
which took tea, — that which came in of a morning and 
stayed to lunch, — and that which was kept over night 
without plan or ceremony. It had never been very easy 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


for US Holabirds to do such things without plan ; of all 
things, nearly, in the world, it seemed to us sometimes 
beautiful and desirable to be able to live just so as that 
we might. 

“ I wish,’’ said Ruth, “ that we could have Lucilla 
Waters here.” ' 

“ My gracious ! ” cried Rosamond, startled into a soft 
explosion. “ What for ? ” 

“ Why, I think she ’d like it,” answered Ruth. 

“ Well, I suppose Arctura Fish might ‘ like it ’ too,” 
responded Rose, in a deadly quiet way now, that was the 
extreme of sarcasm. 

Ruth looked puzzled ; as if she really considered what 
Rosamond suggested, not having thought of it before, and 
not quite knowing how to dispose of the thought since she 
had got it. 

Dakie Thayne was there ; he sat holding some gold- 
colored wool for Mrs. Holabird to wind ; she was giving 
herself the luxury of some pretty knitting, — making a 
bright little sofa affghan. Ruth had forgotten him at the 
instant, speaking out of a quiet pause and her own intent 
thought. 

She made up her mind presently, — partly at least, — 
and spoke again. “ I don’t believe,” she said, “ that it 
would be the next thing for Arctura Fish.” 

Dakie Thayne’s eyebrows went up, just that half per- 
ceptible line or two. “ Do you think people ought always 
to have the next thing? ” he asked. 

“ It seems to me it must be somebody’s fault if they 
don’t,” replied Ruth. 

“ It is a long waiting sometimes to get the next thing,” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 67 

said Dakie Thayne. “ Army men find that out. They 
grow gray getting it.’’ 

-“That ’s where only one can have it at a time,” said 
Ruth. “ These things are different.” 

“ ‘ Next things ’ interfere occasionally,” said Barbara. 
“Next things up, and next things down.” 

“ I don’t know,” said Rose, serenely unconscious and 
impersonal. “ I suppose people would n’t naturally — it 
can’t be meant they should — walk right away from their 
own opportunities.” 

Ruth laughed, — not aloud, only a little single breath, 
over her work. 

Dakie Thayne leaned back. 

“ What, — if you please, — Miss Ruth ? ” 

“ I was thinking of the opportunities down^"* Ruth 
answered. 

It was several days after this that the young party 
drifted together again, on the Westover lawn. A plan 
was discussed. Mrs. Van Alstyne had walked over with 
Olivia and Adelaide Marchbanks, and it was she who 
suggested it. 

“ Why don’t you have regular practisings,” said she, 
“ and then a meeting, for this and the archery you want- 
ed to get up, and games for a prize ? They would do 
nicely together.” 

Olivia Marchbanks drew up a little. She had not 
meant to launch the project here. Everything need not 
begin at Westover all at once. 

But Dakie Thayne broke in. 

‘‘ Did you think of that ? ” said he. It ’s a capital 
idea.” 


68 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Ideas are rather apt to be that,” said Adelaide March- 
banks. “ It is the carrying out, you see.” 

“ Is n’t it pretty nearly carried out already ? It is 
only to organize what we are doing as it is.” 

“ But the minute you do organize ! You don’t know 
how difficult it is in a place like this. A dozen of us are 
not enough, and as soon as you go beyond, there gets to 
be too much of it. One does n’t know where to stop.” 

“Or to skip ? ” asked Harry Goldthwaite, in such a 
purely bright, good-natured way that no one could take 
it amiss. 

“ Well, yes, to skip,” said Adelaide. “ Of course that ’s 
it. You don’t go straight on, you know, house by house, 
when you ask people, — down the hill and into the town.” 

“We talked it over,” said Olivia. “ And we got as 
far as the Hobarts.” There Olivia stopped. That was 
where they had stopped before. 

“ O yes, the Hobarts ; they would be sure to hke it,” 
said Leslie Goldthwaite, quick and pleased. 

“ Her ups and downs are just like yours,” said Dakie 
Thayne to Ruth Holabird. 

It made Ruth very glad to be told she was at all like 
Leslie ; it gave her an especially quick pulse of pleasure 
to have Dakie Thayne say so. She knew he thought 
there was hardly any one like Leslie Goldthwaite. 

“ O, they wonH exactly do, you know ! ” said Adelaide 
Marchbanks, with an air of high free-masonry. 

“ Won’t do what ? ” asked Cadet Thayne, obtusely. 

“ Suit,” replied Olivia, concisely, looking straight for- 
ward without any air at all. 

“ Really, we have tried it since they came,” said Ade- 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


69 


laide ; “ though what people come for is the question, I 
think, when there is n’t anything particular to bring them 
except the neighborhood, and then it has to be Christian 
charity in the neighborhood that did n’t ask them to pick 
them up. Mamma called, after a while ; and Mrs. Hobart 
said she hoped she would come often, and let the girls run 
in and be sociable ! And Grace Hobart says ‘ she has n’t 
got tired of croquet, — she likes it real well ! ’ They ’re 
that sort of people, Mr. Thayne.” 

“ Oh I that ’s very bad,” said Dakie Thayne, with grave 
conclusiveness. 

“ The Haddens had them one night, when we were 
going to play commerce. When we asked them up to 
the table, they held right back, awfully stiff, and could n’t 
find anything else to say than, — out quite loud, across 
everything, — ‘ O no ! they could n’t play commerce ; 
they never did ; father thought it was just like any gam- 
bling game ! ’ ” 

“ Plucky, anyhow,” said Harry Goldthwaite. 

“ I don’t think they meant to be rude,” said Elinor 
Hadden. “ I think they really felt badly ; and that was 
why it blurted right out so. They did n’t know what 
to say.” 

“ Evidently,” said Olivia. “ And one does n’t want 
to be astonished in that way very often.” 

“ I should n’t mind having them,” said Elinor, good- 
naturedty. “ They are kind-hearted people, and they 
would feel hurt to be left out.” 

“ That is just what stopped us,” said Adelaide. “ That 
is just what the neighborhood is getting to be, — full of 
people that you don’t know what to do with.” 


70 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


‘‘ I don’t see why we need to go out of our own set,’^ 
said Olivia. 

“ O dear ! O dear ! ” 

It broke from Ruth involuntarily. Then she colored up, 
as they all turned round upon her ; but she was excited, 
and Ruth’s excitements made her forget that she was 
Ruth, sometimes, for a moment. It had been growing in 
her, from the beginning of the conversation ; and now she 
caught her breath, and felt her eyes light up. She turned 
her face to Leslie Goldthwaite ; but although she spoke 
low she spoke somehow clearly, even more than she 
meant, so that they all heard. 

“ What if the angels had said that before they came 
down to Bethlehem ! ” 

Then she knew by the hush that 8he had astonished 
them, and she grew frightened ; but she stood just so, and 
would not let her look shrink ; for she still felt just as she 
did when the words came. 

Mrs. Van Alstyne broke the pause with a good-natured 
laugh. 

“We can’t go quite back to that, every time,” she said. 
“ And we don’t quite set up to be angels. Come, — 
try one more round.” 

And with some of the hoops still hanging upon her arm, 
she turned to pick up the others. Harry Goldthwaite of 
course sprang forward to do it for her ; and presently she 
was tossing them with her peculiar grace, till the stake 
was all wreathed with them from bottom to top, the last 
hoop hanging itself upon the golden ball ; a touch more 
dexterous and consummate, it seemed, than if it had fairly 
slidden over upon the rest. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


71 



Rosamond knew what a cunning and friendly turn it 
was ; if it had not been for Mrs. Van Alstyne, Ruth’s 
speech would have broken up the party. As it was, the 
game began again, and they stayed an hour longer. 

Not all of them ; for as soon as they were fairly engaged, 
Ruth said to Leslie Goldthwaite, “I must go now ; I ought 
to have gone before. Reba will be waiting for me. J ust 
tell them, if they ask.” 

But Leslie and the cadet walked away with her ; slowly, 
across the grounds, so that she thought they were going 
back from the gate ; but they kept on up over the hill. 

“ Was it very shocking? ” asked Ruth, troubled in her 


72 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


mind. “ I could not help it ; but I was frightened to death 
the next minute.” 

“ About as frightened as the man is who stands to his 
gun in the front,” said Dakie Thayne. “You never 
flinched. ” 

“ They would have thought it was from what I had 
said,” Ruth answered. “ And that was another thing 
from the Baying''* 

“ You had something to say, Leslie. It was just on 
the corner of your lip. I saw it.” 

“ Yes ; but Ruth said it all in one flash. It would have 
spoiled it if I had spoken then.” 

“ I ’m always sorry for people who don’t know how,” 
said Ruth. “ I ’m sure I don’t know how myself so often.” 

“ That is just it,” said Leslie. “ Why should n’t these 
girls come up ? And how will they ever, unless some- 
body overlooks ? They would find out these mistakes in 
a little while, just as they find out fashions : picking up 
the right things from people who do know how. It is a 
kind of leaven, like greater good. And how can we stand 
anywhere in the lump, and say it shall not spread to the 
next particle ? ” ^ 

“ They think it was pushing of them, to come here to 
live at all,” said Ruth. 

“Well, we ’re all pushing, if we ’re good for anything,” 
said Leslie. “ Why may n’t they push, if they don’t 
crowd out anybody else ? It seems to me that the wrong 
sort of pushing is pushing down.” 

“ Only there would be no end to it,” said Dakie Thayne, 
“ would there ? There are coarse, vulgar people always, 
who are wanting to get in just for the sake of being in. 
What are the nice ones to do ? ” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


73 


“Just he nice, I think,” said Leslie. “Nicer with 
those people than with anybody else even. If there 
were n’t any difficulty made about it, — if there were n’t 
any keeping out, — they would tire of the niceness prob- 
ably sooner than anything. I don’t suppose it is the fence 
that keeps out weeds.” 

“ You are just like Mrs. Ingleside,” said Ruth, walking 
closer to Leslie as she spoke. 

“ And Mrs. Ingleside is like Miss Craydocke ; and — 
I did n’t suppose I should ever find many more of them, 
but they ’re counting up,” said Dakie Thayne. “ There ’s 
a pretty good piece of the world salted, after all.” 

“ If there really is any best society,” pursued Leslie, 
“ it seems to me it ought to be, not for keeping people 
out, but for getting everybody in as fast as it can, like the 
kingdom of heaven.” 

“ Ah, but that is kingdom come,” said Dakie Thayne. 

It seemed as if the question of “ things next ” was to 
arise continually, in fresh shapes, just now, when things 
next for the Holabirds were nearer next than ever before. 

“We must have Delia Waite again soon, if we can get 
her,’^ said 'mother, one morning, when we were all quietly 
sitting in her room, and she was cutting out some shirts for 
Stephen. “ All our changes and interruptions have put 
back the sewing so lately.” 

“We ought not to have been idle so much,” said Bar- 
bara. “ We ’ve been a family of grasshoppers all summer.” 

“ Well, the grasshopping has done you all good. I ’m 
not sorry for it,” said Mrs. Holabird. “ Only we must 
have Delia for a week now, and be busy.” 

“ If Delia Waite did n’t have to come to our table ! ” 
said Rosamond. 


74 


WK GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Why don’t you try the girl Mrs. Hadden has, mother ? 
She goes right into the kitchen with the other servants.” 

“ I don’t believe our ‘ other servants ’ would know what 
to do with her,” said Barbara. “ There ’s always such a 
crowd in our kitchen.” 

“ Barbara, you ’re a plague ! ” 

“ Yes. I ’m the thorn in the flesh in this family, lest it 
should be exalted above measure ; and like Saint Paul, I 
magnify mine office.” 

“ In the way we live,” said Mrs. Holabird, “ it is really 
more convenient to let a seamstress come right to table 
with us ; and besides, you know what I think about it. 
It is a little breath of life to a girl like that ; she gets 
something that we can give as well as not, and that helps 
her up. It comes naturally, as it cannot come with ‘ other 
servants.’ She sits with us all day ; her work is among 
ladies, and with them ; she gets something so far, even 
in the midst of measurings and gorings, that common 
housemaids cannot get ; why should n’t she be with us 
when we can leave off talk of measures and gores, and 
get what Ruth calls the ‘very next’ ? Delia Waite is 
too nice a girl to be put into the kitchen to eat with Katty, 
in her ‘ crowd.’ ” 

“ But it seems to set us down ; it seems common in us 
to be so ready to be familiar with common people. More 
in us, because we do live plainly. If Mrs. Hadden or 
Mrs. Marchbanks did it, it might seem kind without the 
common. I think they ought to begin such things.” 

“ But then if they don’t ? Very likely it would be far 
more inconvenient for them ; and not the same good 
either, because it would be, or seem, a condescension. 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 75 

We are the ‘ very next,’ and we must be content to be 
the step we are.” 

“ It ’s the other thing with us, — con-ascension, — is n’t 
it, mother ? A step up for somebody, and no step down 
for anybody. Mrs. Ingleside does it,” Ruth added. 

‘‘ O, Mrs. Ingleside does all sorts of things. She has 
that sort of position. It ’s as independent as the other. 
High moral and high social can do anything. It ’s the 
betwixt and between that must be careful.” 

‘‘ What a miserably negative set we are, in such a posi- 
tive state of the world ! ” cried Barbara. “ Except Ruth’s 
music, there is n’t a specialty among us ; we have n’t any 
views; we’re on the .mean-spirited side of the Woman 
Question ; ‘ all woman, and no question,’ as mother says ; 
we shall never preach, nor speech, nor leech ; we can’t 
be magnificent, and we won’t be common ! I don’t see 
what is to become of us, unless — and I wonder if maybe 
that is n’t it ? — we just do two or three rather right 
things in a no-particular sort of a way.” 

“ Barbara, how nice you are ! ” cried Ruth. 

“ No. I ’m a thorn. Don’t touch me.” 

“We never have company when we are having sewing 
done,” said Mrs. HolaWrd. “We can always manage 
that.” 

“ I don’t want to play Box and Cox,” said Rosamond. 

“ That ’s the beauty of you, Rosa Mundi ! ” said Bar- 
bara, warmly. “You don’t want to play anything. 
That ’s where you ’L' come out sun-clear and diamond 
bright I ’’ 


76 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


CHAPTER V. 

THE “BACK YETT AJEE.’ 



HOSE who do not like common 
people need not read this chap- 
ter. 

We had Delia Waite the next 
week. It happened well, in a 
sort of Box-and-Cox fashion ; 
for Mrs. Van Alstyne went off 
with some friends to the Isles 
of Shoals, and Alice and Ade- 
laide Marchhanks went with 
her ; so that we knew we should 
see nothing of the two great 
families for a good many days ; 
and when Leslie came, or the 
Haddens, we did not so much 
mind; besides, they knew that 
we were busy, and they did not 
expect any “ coil ’’ got up for 
them. Leslie came right up stairs, when she was alone ; 
if Harry or Mr. Thayne were with her, one of us would 
take a wristband or a bit of ruffling, and go down. Some- 
how, if it happened to be Harry, Barbara was always 
tumultuously busy, and never offered to receive ; but it 


4 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


77 


»• 

always ended in Rosamond’s making her. It seemed to 
be one of the things that people wait to be overcome in 
their objections to. 

We always had a snug, cosey time when Delia was with 
'f, us ; we were all simple and busy, and the work was getting 
on ; that was such an under-satisfaction ; and Delia was 
having such a good time. She hardly ever failed to come 
to us when we wanted her ; she could always make some 
arrangement. 

Ruth was artful; she tucked in Lucilla Waters, after 
all ; she said it would be such a nice chance to have her ; 
she knew she would rather come when we were by our- 
selves, and especially when we had our work and patterns 
. about. Lucilla brought a sack and an overskirt to make ; 

she could hardly have been spared if she had had to bring 
^ mere idle work. She sewed in gathers upon the shirts for 
mother, while Delia cut out her pretty material in a style 
■ she had not seen. If we had had grasshopper parties all 
summer before, this was certainly a bee*, and I think we 
all really liked it just as well as the other. 

We had the comfort of mother’s great, airy room, now, 
as we had never even realized it before. Everybody had 
a window to sit at ; green-shaded with closed blinds for 
the most part ; but that is so beautiful in summer, when 
t the out-of-doors comes brimming in with scent and sound, 

I and we know how glorious it is if we choose to open to it, 



(■ wide in the cooling afternoon. 

; ■ “How glad I am we have to have busy weeks some- 

; times ! ” said Ruth, stopping the little “ common-sense ” 
■ for an instant, while she tossed a long flouncing over her 


78 


WE GIELS: A HOME STOKY. 


sewing-table. “ I know now why people who never do 
their own work are obliged to go away from home for a 
change. It must be dreadfully same if they did n’t. J 
like a book full of different stories ! ” 

Lucilla Waters lives down in the heart of the town. 
So does Leslie Goldthwaite, to be sure ; but then Mr. 
Goldthwaite’s is one of the old, old-fashioned houses that 
were built when the town was country, and that has its 
great yard full of trees and flowers around it now ; and 
Mrs. Waters lives in a block, flat-face to the street, with 
nothing pretty outside, and not very much in ; for they 
have never been rich, the Waterses, and Mr. Waters died 
ten years ago, when Lucilla was a little child. Lucilla 
and her mother keep a little children’s school ; but it was 
vacation now, of course. 

Lucilla is in Mrs. Ingleside’s Bible-class ; that is l^ow 
Ruth, and then the rest of us, came to know her. Arctura 
Fish is another of Mrs. Ingleside’s scholars. She is a poor 
girl, living at service, — or, rather, working in a family 
for board, clothing, and a little ‘‘ schooling,” — the best of 
which last she gets on Sundays of Mrs. Ingleside, — until 
she shall have “ learned how,” and be “ worth wages.” 

Arctura Fish is ;naking herself up, slowly, after the 
pattern of Lucilla Waters. She would not undertake 
Leslie Goldthwaite or Helen Josselyn, — Mrs. Ingleside’s 
younger sister, who stays with her so much, — or even 
our quiet Ruth. But Lucilla Waters comes just next. 
She can just reach up to her. She can see how she does 
up her hair, in something approaching the new way, lean- 
ing back behind her in the class and tracing out the twists 
between the questions ; for Lucilla can only afford to use 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


79 


fier own, and a few strands of harmless Berlin wool under 
it ; she can’t buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats, or 
intricacies ready made up at the — upholsterer’s, I was 
going to say. So it is not a hopeless puzzle and an im- 
practicable achievement to little Arctura Fish. It is won- 
derful how nice she has made herself look lately, and how 
many little ways she puts on, just like Lucilla’s. She 
has n’t got beyond mere mechanical copying, yet ; when 
she reaches to where Lucilla really is, she will take in 
differently.' 

Ruth gave up her little white room to Delia Waite, and 
went to sleep with Lucilla in the great, square east room. 

Delia Waite thought a great deal of this ; and it was 
wonderful how nobody could ever get a peep at the room 
► when it looked as if anything in it had been used or 
touched. Ruth is pretty nice about it; but she cannot 
keep it so sacredly fair and pure as Delia did for her. 
Only one thing showed. 

“ I say,” said Stephen, one morning, sliding by Ruth 
on the stair-rail as they came down to breakfast, “ do you 
look after that now, mornings ? ” 

“ No,” said Ruth, laughing, “ of course I can’t.” 

“ It ’s always whopped,” said Stephen, sententiously. 

Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these 
days. Not her very finest, out of Miss Leslie ; she said 
that was too much like the fox and the crane, when Lu- 
cilla asked for the receipts. It was n’t fair to give a taste 
of things that we ourselves could only have for very best, 
and send people home to wish for them. But she made 
some of her “ griddles trimmed with lace,” as only Bar- 
bara’s griddles were trimmed ; the brown lightness rum 


7 


80 


WE GIKLS: A HOME STORY. 


ning out at the edges into crisp filigree. And another 
time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed 
golden-tawny over the coals ; and then it was breakfast 
potato, beaten almost frothy with one white- of-egg, a 
pretty good bit of butter, a few spoonfuls of top-of-the- 
milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt, and delicately 
with pepper, — the oven doing the rest, and turning it 
into a snowy souflld. 

Barbara said we had none of us a specialty ; she knew 
better ; only hers was a very womanly and old-fashioned, 
not to say kitcheny one ; and would be quite at a discount 
when the grand co-operative kitchens should come into 
play ; for who cares to put one’s genius into the universal 
and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-souffles to be 
carried half a mile to the table ? 

Barbara delighted to “ make company ” of seamstress 
week ; “ it was so nice,” she said, “ to entertain some- 
body who thought ‘ chickings was ’evingly.’ ” 

Rosamond liked that part of it ; she enjoyed giving 
pleasure no less than any ; but she had a secret misgiving 
that we were being very vulgarly comfortable in an un- 
derhand way. She would never, by any means, go off by 
herself to eat with her fingers. 

Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she 
did not get some new ideas to carry home to Arabel. 

Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more ; she was 
the oldest child of one marriage and Delia the youngest 
of another. All the Waites between them had dropped 
away, — out of the world, or into homes here and there 
of their own, — and Arabel and Delia were left together 
in the square, low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other 
hill, where the town ran up small. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


81 


Arabel Waite was an old dressmaker. She could make 
two skirts to a dress, one shorter, the other longer ; and 
she could cut out the upper one by any new paper pattern ; 
and she could make shell-trimmings and flutings and box- 
plaitings and flouncings, and sew them on exquisitely, 
even now, with her old eyes ; but she never had adapted 
herself to the modem ideas of the corsage. She could not 
fit a bias to save her life ; she could only stitch up a 
straight slant, and leave the rest to nature and fate. So 
all her people had the squarest of wooden fronts, and were 
preternaturally large around the waist. Delia sewed 
with her, abroad and at home, — abroad without her, 
also, as she was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, 
or a cape, or a panier, — or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or 
a johnny-cake, was something to go home with rejoi- 
cing. 

Arabel Waite and Delia could only use three rooms of 
the old house ; the rest was blinded and shut up ; the 
garret was given over to the squirrels, who came in from 
the great butternut-trees in the yard, and stowed away 
their rich provision under the eaves and away down be- 
tween the walls, and grew fat there all winter, and frolicked 
like a troop of horse. We liked to hear Delia tell of their 
pranks, and of all the other queer, quaint things in their 
way of living. Everybody has a way of living ; and if 
you can get into it, every one is as good as a story. It 
always seemed to us as if Delia brought with her the at- 
mosphere of mysterious old houses, and old, old books 
stowed away in their by-places, and stories of the far past 
that had been lived there, and curious ancient garments 
done with long ago, and packed into trunks and bureaus 


82 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


in the dark, unused rooms, where there had been parties 
once, and weddings and funerals and children’s games in 
nurseries ; and strange fellowship of little wild things that 
strayed in now, — bees in summer, and squirrels in win- 
ter, — and brought the woods and fields with them under 
the old roof. Why, I think we should have missed it 
more than she would, if we had put her into some back 
room, and poked her sewing in at her, and left her to her- 
self! 

The only thing that was n’t nice that week was Aunt 
Roderick coming over one morning in the very thick of 
our work, and Lucilla’s too, walking straight up stairs, as 
aunts can, whether you want them or not, and standing 
astonished at the great goings-on. 

“ Well 1 ” she exclaimed, with a strong falling inflection, 
“ are any of you getting ready to be married ? ” 

“ Yes ’m,” said Barbara, gravely, handing her a chair. 
“ All of us.” 

Then Barbara made rather an unnecessary parade of 
ribbon that she was quilling up, and of black lace that was 
to go each side of it upon a little round jacket for her blue 
silk dress, made of a piece laid away five years ago, when 
she first had it. The skirt was turned now, and the waist 
was gone. 

While Aunt Roderick was there, she also took occasion 
to toss over, more or less, everything that lay about, — 
“ to help her in her inventory,” she said after she went 
away. 

“ Twelve new embroidered cambric handkerchiefs,” 
repeated she, as she turned back from the stair-head, 
having seen Aunt Roderick down. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


83 


Barbara had once, in a severe fit of needle-industry, 
inspired by the discovery of two baby robes of linen cam- 
bric among mother’s old treasures, and their bestowal 
upon her, turned them into these elegances, broadly 
hemmed with the finest machine stitch, and marked with 
beautiful great B’s in the corners. She showed them, in 
her pride, to Mrs. Roderick ; and we knew afterward 
what her abstract report had been, in Grandfather Hola- 
bird’s hearing. Grandfather Holabird knew we did with- 
out a good many things ; but he had an impression of 
us, from instances like these, that we were seized with 
sudden spasms of recklessness at times, and rushed into 
French embroideries and sets of jewelry. I believe he 
heard of mother’s one handsome black silk, every time 
she wore it upon semiannual occasions, until he would 
have said that Mrs. Stephen had a new fifty-dollar dress 
every six months. This was one of our little family 
trials. 

“ I don’t think Mrs. Roderick does it on purpose,” 
Ruth would say. “ I think there are two things that 
make her talk in that way. In the first place, she has 
got into the habit of carrying home all the news she can, 
and making it as big as possible, to amuse Mr. Holabird ; 
and then she has to settle it over in her own mind, every 
once in a while, that things must be pretty comfortable 
amongst us, down here, after all.” 

Ruth never dreamed of being satirical ; it was a per-^ 
fectly straightforward explanation ; and it showed, she 
truly believed, two quite kind and considerate points in 
Aunt Roderick’s character. 

After the party came back from the Isles of Shoals, 


84 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


Mrs. Van Alstyne went down to Newport. The March* 
bankses had other visitors, — people whom we did not 
know, and in whose way we were not thrown ; the haute 
volee was sufficient to itself again, and we lived on a piece 
of our own life once more. 

“ It ’s rather nice to knit on straight,” said Bar- 
bara ; “ without any widening or narrowing or count- 
ing of stitches. I like very well to come to a plain 
place.” 

Rosamond never liked the plain places quite so much ; 
but she accommodated herself beautifully, and was just as 
nice as she could be. And the very best thing about 
Rose was, that she never put on anything, or left any- 
thing off, of her gentle ways and notions. She would 
have been ready at any time for the most delicate fancy- 
pattern that could be woven upon her plain places. That 
was one thing which mother taught us all. 

“ Your life will come to you ; you need not run after 
it,” she would say, if we ever got restless and began to 
think there was no way out of the family hedge. “ Have 
everything in yourselves as it should be, and then you can 
take the chances as they arrive.” 

“ Only we need n’t put our bonnets on, and sit at the 
windows,” Barbara once replied. 

“No,” said Mrs. Holabird ; “ and especially at the 
front windows. A great deal that is good — a great deal 
of the best — comes in at the back-doors.” 

Everybody, we thought, did not have a back-door to 
their life, as we did. They hardly seemed to know if they 
had one to their houses. 

Our “ back yett was ajee,” now, at any rate. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


85 


Leslie Goldthwaite came in at it, though, just the same, 
and so did her cousin and Dakie.* 

Otherwise, for two or three weeks, our chief variety 
was in sending for old Miss Trixie Spring to spend the day. 

Miss Trixie Spring is a lively old lady, who, some 
threescore and five years ago, was christened “ Beatrix.’’ 
She plays backgammon in the twilights, with mother, and 
makes a table at whist, at once lively and severe, in the 
evenings, for father. At this whist-table, Barbara usu- 
ally is the fourth. Rosamond gets sleepy over it, and 
Ruth — Miss Trixie says — “ plays like a ninkum.” 

We always wanted Miss Trixie, somehow, to complete 
comfort, when we were especially comfortable by our- 
selves ; when we had something particularly good for din- 
ner, or found ourselves set cheerily down for a long day 
at quiet work, with everytning early-nice about us ; or 
when we were going to make something “ contrive-y,” 
“ Swiss-family-Ro‘binson-ish,'’ that got us all together over 
it, in the hilarity of enterprise and the zeal of acquisition. 
Miss Trixie could appreciate homely cleverness ; darning 
of carpets and covering of old furniture ; she could darn a 
carpet herself, so as almost to improve upon — certainly 
to supplant — the original pattern. Yet she always had a 
fresh amazement for all our performances, as if nothing not- 
able had ever been done before, and a personal delight in 
every one of our improvements, as if they had been her own. 

“We ’re just as cosey as we can be, already, — it is n’t 
that ; but we want somebody to tell us how cosey we are. 
Let ’s get Miss Trixie to-day,” says Barbara. 

* Harry Goldthwaite is Leslie’s cousin, and Mr. Aaron Goldthwaite’s 
ward. I do not believe we have ever thought to put this in before. 


86 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Once was when the new drugget went down, at last, 
in the dining-room. It was tan-color, bound with crim- 
son, — covering three square yards ; and mother nailed it 
down with brass-headed tacks, right after breakfast, one 
cool morning. Then Katty washed up the dark floor- 
margin, and the table had its crimson-striped cloth on, and 
mother brought down the brown stuff for the new sofa- 
cover, and the great bunch of crimson braid to bind that 
with, and we drew up our camp-chairs and crickets, and 
got ready to be busy and jolly, and to have a brand-new 
piece of furniture before night. 

Barbara had made peach-dumpling for dinner, and of 
course Aunt Trixie was the last and crowning suggestion. 
It was not far to send, and she was not long in coming, 
with her second-best cap pinned up in a handkerchief, and 
her knitting-work and her spectacles in her bag. 

The Marchbankses never made sofa-covers of brown 
waterproof, nor had Miss Trixies to spend the day. That 
was because they had no back-door to their house. 

I suppose you think there are a good many people in our 
story. There are ; when we think it up there are ever so 
many people that have to do with our story every day ; 
but we don’t mean to tell you all their stories ; so you can 
bear with the momentary introduction when you meet 
them in our brown room, or in our dining-room, of a 
morning, although we know very well also that passing 
introductions are going out of fashion. 

We had Dakie Thayne’s last visit that day, in the midst 
of the hammering and binding. Leslie and he came in 
with Ruth, when she came back from her hour with Reba 
Hadden. It was to bid us good by ; his furlough was over^ 
he was to return to West Point on Monday. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


87 



“ Another two years’ pull,” he said. “ Won’t you all 
come to West Point next summer ? ” 

“ If we take the journey we think of,” said Barbara, 
composedly, — “to the mountains and Montreal and Que- 
bec ; perhaps up the Saguenay ; and then back, up Lake 
Champlain, and down the Hudson, on our way to Saratoga 
and Niagara. We might keep on to West Point first, and 
have a day or tw) there.” 

“ Barbara,” said mother, remonstratingly. 

“ Why ? DorCt we think of it ? I ’m sure I do. I ’ve 
thought of it till I ’m almost tired of it. I don’t much 
believe we shall come, after all, Mr. Thayne.” 


88 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


“We shall miss you very much,*’ said Mrs. Holahird, 
covering Barbara’s nonsense. 

“ Our summer has stopped right in the middle,” said 
Barbara, determined to talk. 

“ I shall hear about you all,” said Dakie Thayne. 
“ There ’s to be a Westover column in Leslie’s news. I 
wish — ” and there the cadet stopped. 

Mother looked up at him with a pleasant inquiry. 

“ I was going to say, I wish there might be a Westover 
correspondent, to put in just a word or two, sometimes ; 
but then I was afraid that would be impertinent. When 
a fellow has only eight weeks in the year of living, Mrs. 
Holabird, and all the rest is drill, you don’t know how he 
hangs on to those eight weeks, — and how they hang on to 
him afterwards.” 

Mother looked so motherly at him then ! 

“We shall not forget you — Dakie,” she said, using his 
first name for the first time. “You shall have a message 
from us now and then.” 

Dakie said, “ Thank you,” in a tone that responded to 
her “ Dakie.” 

We all knew he liked Mrs. Holabird ever so much. 
Homes and mothers are beautiful things to boys who have 
had to do without them. 

He shook hands with us all round, when he got up to go. 
He shook hands also with our old friend. Miss Trixie, 
whom he had never happened to see before. Then Ros- 
amond went out with him and Leslie, — as it was our 
cordial, countrified fashion for somebody to do, — through 
the hall to the door. Ruth went as far as the stairs, on her 
way to her room to take off her things. She stood there, 
up two steps, as they were leaving. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


89 


Dakie Thayne said good by again to Rosamond, at the 
door, as was natural ; and then he came quite back, and 
said it last of all, once more, to little Ruth upon the stairs. 
He certainly did hate to go away and leave us all. 

“That is a very remarkable pretty -behaved young 
man,” said Miss Trixie, when we all picked up our breadths 
of waterproof, and got in behind them again. 

“ The world is a desert, and the sand has got into my 
eyes,” said Barbara, who had hushed up ever since mother 
had said “ Dakie.” When anybody came close to mother, 
Barbara was touched. I think her love for mother is more 
like a son’s than a daughter’s, in the sort of chivalry it has 
with it. 

It was curious how suddenly our little accession of social 
importance had come on, and wonderful how quickly it 
had subsided ; more curious and wonderful still, how en- 
tirely it seemed to stay subsided. 

We had plenty to do, though ; we did not miss anything; 
only we had quite taken up with another set of things. 
This was the way it was with us ; we had things we must 
take up ; we could not have spared time to lead society 
for a long while together. 

Aunt Roderick claimed us, too, in our leisure hours, just 
then ; she had a niece come to stay with her ; and we had 
to go over to the “ old house ” and spend afternoons, and 
ask Aunt Roderick and Miss Bragdowne in to tea with 
us. Aunt Roderick always expected this sort of attention ; 
and yet she had a way with her as if we ought not to try 
to afford things, looked scrutinizingly at the quality of our 
cake and preserves, and seemed to eat our bread and but' 
ter with consideration. 


90 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


It helped Rosamond very much, though, over the tran- 
sition. We, also, had had private occupation. 

“ There had been family company at grandfather’s,” 
she told Jeannie Hadden, one morning. “We had been 
very much engaged among ourselves. We had hardly 
seen anything of the other girls for two or three -weeks.” 

Barbara sat at the round table, where Stephen had been 
doing his geometry last night, twirling a pair of pencil 
compasses about on a sheet of paper, while this was say- 
ing. She lifted up her eyes a little, cornerwise, without 
moving her head, and gave a twinkle of mischief over at 
mother and Ruth. When Jeannie was gone, she kept on 
silently, a few minutes, with her diagrams. Then she 
said, in her funniest, repressed way, — 

“ I can see a little how it must be ; but I suppose I 
ought to understand the differential calculus to compute 
it. Circles are wonderful things ; and the science of 
curves holds almost everything. Rose, when do you 
think we shall get round again ? ” 

She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled 
over with intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against 
whose curves and circumferences she had written names : 
Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite, Holabird. 

“ It ’s a mere question of centre and radius,” she said. 
“ You may be big enough to take in the whole of them, 
or you may only cut in at the sides. You may be just 
tangent for a minute, and then go off into space on your 
own account. You may have your centre barely inside 
of a great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a 
good part ; you must be small to be taken quite in by 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


91 


“ It does n’t illustrate,” said Rose, coolly. “ Orbits 
don’t snarl up in that fashion.” 

“ Geometry does,” said Barbara. “ I told you I could n’t 
work it all out. But I suppose there ’s a Q. E. D. at the 
end of it somewhere.” 

Two or three days after something new happened ; an 
old thing happened freshly, rather, — which also had to 
do with our orbit and its eccentricities. Barbara, as usual, 
discovered and announced it. 

“ I should think any kind of an astronomer might be 
mad ! ” she exclaimed. “ Periods and distances are bad 
enough ; but then come the perturbations ! Here ’s one. 
We ’re used to it, to be sure ; but we never know exactly 
where it may come in. The girl we live with has formed 
other views for herself, and is going off at a tangent. 
What is the reason we can’t keep a satellite, — planet, I 
mean ? ” 

“ Barbara ! ” said mother, anxiously, “ don’t be absurd ! ” 

“Well, what shall I be ? We’re all out of a place 
again.” And she sat down resignedly on a very low 
cricket, in the middle of the room. 

“ I ’ll tell you what we ’ll do, mother,” said Ruth, com- 
ing round. “ I ’ve thought of it this good while. We ’ll 
co-operate ! ” 

“ She ’s glad of it ! She ’s been waiting for a chance ! 
I believe she put the luminary up to it ! Ruth, you ’re a 
brick — moon I ” 


92 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


CHAPTER VI. 

CO-OPERATING. 


HEN mother first read that arti 
cle in the Atlantic she had said^ 
right off, — 

“ I ’m sure I wish they 
would ! ” 

“ Would what, mother ? 
asked Barbara. 

“ Co-operate.” 

“ O mother ! I really do be- 
lieve you must belong, some- 
how, to the Micawber family ! 
I should n’t wonder if one of 
these days, when they come into 
their luck, you should hear of 
something greatly to your ad- 
vantage, from over the water. 
You have such faith in ‘ they’ ! 
I don’t believe ‘ they ’ will ever 

do much for ^ us 

“ What is it, dear ? ” asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from 
a little arm-chair wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had 
taken up the magazine. 

Mrs. Hobart had come in, with her cable wool and her 
great ivory knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably. 



WE GIELS; A HOME STORY. 


93 


“ Co-operative housekeeping, ma’am,” said Barbara. 

“ Oh ! Yes, That is what they used to have,, in old 
times, when we lived at home with mother. Only they 
did n’t write articles about it. All the women in a house 
co-operated — to keep it ; and all the neighborhood co- 
operated — by living exactly in the same way. Nowa- 
days, it ’s co-operative shirking ; is n’t it ? ” 

One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was 
more simple or sharp. 

That was all that was said about co-operative house- 
keeping at the time'. But Ruth remembered the conver- 
sation. So did Barbara, for a while, as appeared in 
something she came out with a few days after. 

“ I could — almost — write a little poem ! ” she said, 
suddenly, over her work. “ Only that would be doing 
just what the rest do. Everything turns into a poem, or 
an article, nowadays. I wish we ’d lived in the times 
when people did the things ! ” 

“ O Barbara ! , Think of all that is being done in the 
world ! ” 

“ I know. But the little private things. They want 
to turn everything into a movement. Miss Trixie says 
they won’t have any eggs from their fowls next winter ; 
all their chickens are roosters, and all they ’ll do will be 
to sit in a row on the fence and crow ! I think the world 
is running pretty much to roosters.” 

“ Is that the poem ? ” 

“ I don’t know. It might come in. All I ’ve got is 
the end of it. It came into my head hind side before. If 
it could only have a beginning and a middle put to it, it 
might do. It ’s just the wind-up, where they have to 


94 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


give an account, you know, and what they ’ll have to 
show for it, and the thing that really amounts, after all.” 

“ Well, tell us.” 

“ It ’s only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might 
be written up to. They could say all sorts of things, — 
one and another : — 

“7 wrote some little books ; 

I said some little says ; 

I preached a little preach ; 

I lit a little blaze ; 

I made things pleasant in one little place.” 

There was a shout at Barbara’s “ poem.” 

“ I thought I might as well relieve my mind,” she said, 
meekly. “ I knew it was all there would ever be of it.” 

But Barbara’s rhyme stayed in our heads, and got 
quoted in the family. She illustrated on a small scale 
what the “ poems and articles ” may sometimes do in the 
great world. 

We remembered it that day when Ruth said, “ Let ’s 
co-operate,” 

We talked it over, — what we could do without a girl. 
We had talked it over before. We had had to try it, 
more or less, during interregnums. But in our little 

house in Z , with the dark kitchen, and with Barbara 

and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when 
we had to hire, it always cost more than it came to, be- 
sides making what Barb called a “ heave-offering of life.” 

“ They used to have houses built accordingly,” Rosa- 
mond said, speaking of the “ old times.” “ Grandmother’s 
kitchen was the biggest and pleasantest room in the 
house.” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


95 


“ Could n’t we make the kitchen the pleasantest 
room ? ” suggested Ruth. “ Would n’t it be sure to be, 
if it was the room we all stayed in mornings, and where 
we had our morning work ? Whatever room we do that 
in always is, you know. The look grows. Kitchens are 
horrid when girls have just gone out of them, and left the 
dish-towels dirty, and the dish-cloth all wabbled up in the 
sink, and all the tins and irons wanting to be cleaned. 
But if we once got up a real ladies’ kitchen of our own ! 
I can think how it might be lovely ! ” 

“ I can think how it might be jolly-nificent ! ” cried 
Barbara, relapsing into her dislocations. 

“ You like kitchens,” said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet 
ill-usedness. 

“ Yes, I do,” said Barbara. “ And you like parlors, and 
prettinesses, and feather dusters, and little general touch- 
ings-up, that I can’t have patience with. You shall take the 
high art, and I ’ll have the low realities. That ’s the co- 
operation. Families are put up assorted, and the home 
character comes of it. It ’s Bible-truth, you know ; the 
head and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. 
Let ’s just see what we shall come to ! People don’t turn 
out what they ’re meant, who have Irish kitchens and 
high-style parlors, all alike. There ’s a great deal in being 
Holabirdy, — or whatever-else-you-are-y ! ” 

“ If it only were n’t for that cellar-kitchen,” said Mrs. 
Holabird. 

“ Mother,” said Ruth, “ what if we were to take this ? 

We were in the dining-room. 

“ This nice room ! ” 

‘‘ It is to be a ladies’ kitchen, you know.” 


96 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. 
The dark- stained floor, showing clean, undefaced mar- 
gins, — the new, pretty drugget, — the freshly clad, broad 
old sofa, — the high wainscoted walls, painted in oak and 
walnut colors, and varnished brightly, — the ceiling faint- 
ly tinted with buff, — the buff holland shades to the win- 
dows, — the dresser-closet built out into the room on one 
side, with its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our 
prettiest china and a gleam of silver and glass, — the two 
or three pretty engravings in the few spaces for them, — 
O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a kitchen. 

But Ruth began again. 

“ You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice 
everything was down stairs. We cooked nearly a fort- 
night, and washed dishes, and everything ; and we only 
had the floor scrubbed once, and there never was a slop 
on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It 
would be so different from a girl ! It seems as if we might 
bring the kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the 
kitchen.” 

“ But the stove,” said mother. 

I think,” said Barbara, boldly, “ that a cooking-stove, 
all polished up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in 
a house ! ” 

“ It is clumsy, one must own,” said Mrs. Holabird, 
“ besides being suggestive.” 

“ So is a piano,” said the determined Barbara. 

“ I can imagine a cooking-stove,” said Rosamond, 
slowly. 

“ Well, do ! That ’s just where your gift will come in ! ” 

“ A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


97 


to order, — like an urn, or something, — with a copper 
faucet, and nothing else ever about, except it were that 
minute wanted; and all the tins and irons begun with 
new again, and kept clean ; and little cocoanut dippers 
with German silver rims ; and things generally contrived 
as they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use ; 
it might be like that little picnicking dower-house we 
read about in a novel, or like Marie Antoinette’s Tria- 
non.” 

“ That ’s what it would come to, if it was part of our 
living, just as we come to have gold thimbles and lovely 
work-boxes. We should give each other Christmas and 
birthday presents of things ; we should have as much 
pleasure and pride in it as in the china-closet. Why, the 
whole trouble is that the kitchen is the only place taste 
has Vbt got into. Let ’s have an art-kitchen ! ” 

“We might spend a little money in fitting up a few 
things freshly, if we are to save the waste and expense of 
a servant,” said Mrs. Holabird. 

The idea grew and developed. 

“ But when we have people to tea ! ” Rosamond said, 
suddenly demurring afresh. 

“ There ’s always the brown room, and the handing 
round,” said Barbara, “ for the people you can’t be inti- 
mate with, and think how crowsy this will be with Aunt 
Trixie or Mrs. Hobart or the Goldthwaites ! ” 

“ We shall just settle down^'^ said Rose, gloomily. 

“ Well, I believe in finding our place. Every little 
brook runs till it does that. I don’t want to stand on tip- 
toe all my life.” 

“We shall always gather to us what belongs. Every 
7 


98 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


little crystal does that,” said mother, taking up another 
simile. 

“ What will Aunt Roderick say ? ” said Ruth. 

“ I shall keep her out of the kitchen, and tell her we 
could n’t manage with one girl any longer, and so we ’ve 
taken three that all wanted to get a place together.” 

And Barbara actually did ; and it was three weeks be- 
fore Mrs. Roderick found out what it really meant. 

We were in a hurry to have Katty go, and to begin, 
after we had made up our minds ; and it was with the 
serenest composure that Mrs. Holabird received her re- 
mark that “ her week would be up a-Tuesday, an’ she 
hoped agin then we ’d be shooted wid a girl.” 

“ Yes, Katty ; I am ready at any moment,” was the 
reply ; which caused the whites of Katty’s eyes to appear 
for a second between the lids and the irids. 

There had been only one applicant for the place, who 
had come while we had not quite irrevocably fixed our 
plans. 

Mother swerved for a moment ; she came in and told 
us what the girl said. 

“ She is not experienced ; but she looks good-natured ; 
and she is willing to come for a trial.” 

‘‘ They all do that,” said Barbara, gravely. “ I think — 
as Protestants — we ’ve hired enough of them.” 

Mother laughed, and let the “ trial ” go. That was 
the end, I think, of our indecisions. 

We got Mrs. Dunikin to come and scrub ; we pulled 
out pots and pans, stove-polish and dish- towels, napkins 
and odd stockings missed from the wash ; we cleared 
every corner, and had every box and bottle washed ; then 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


99 


we left everything below spick and span, so that it almost 
tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron 
man, and had the stove taken up stairs. We only car- 
ried up such lesser movables as we knew we should want ; 
we left all the accumulation behind ; we resolved to begin 
life anew, and feel our way, and furnish as we went along. 

Ruth brought home a lovely little spice-box as the first 
donation to the art-kitchen. Father bought a copper tea- 
kettle, and the sheet-iron man made the tin boiler. There 
was a wide, high, open fireplace in the dining-room ; we 
had wondered what we should do with it in the winter. 
It had a soapstone mantel, with fluted pilasters, and a 
brown-stone hearth and jambs. Back a little, between 
these sloping jambs, we had a nice iron fire-board set, 
with an ornamental collar around the funnel-hole. The 
stove stood modestly sheltered, as it were, in its new po- 
sition, its features softened to almost a sitting-room con- 
gruity ; it did not thrust itself obtrusively forward, and 
force its homely associatfon upon you ; it was low, too, 
and its broad top looked smooth and enticing. 

There was a large, light closet at the back of the room, 
where was set a broad, deep iron sink, and a pump came 
up from the cistern. This closet had double sliding 
doors ; it could be thrown all open for busy use, or closed 
quite away and done with. 

There were shelves here, and cupboards. Here we 
ranged our tins and our saucepans, — the best and 
newest; Rosamond would have nothing to do with the 
old battered ones ; over them we hung our spoons and our 
little strainers, our egg-beaters, spatulas, and quart meas- 
ures, — these last polished to the brightness of silver tank- 


100 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


ards ; in one corner stood the flour-barrel, and over it 
was the sieve ; in the cupboards were our porcelain ket- 
tles, — we bought two new ones, a little and a big, — the 
frying-pans, delicately smooth and nice now, outside and 
in, the roasting-pans, and the one iron pot, which we 
never meant to use when we could help it. The worst 
things we could have to wash were the frying and roast- 
ing pans, and these, we soon found, were not bad when 
you did it all over and at once every time. 

Adjoining this closet was what had been the “ girl’s 
room,” opening into the passage where the kitchen stairs 



WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


101 


came up j and the passage itself was fair-sized and square, 
corresponding to the depth of the other divisions. Here 
we had a great box placed for wood, and a barrel for 
coal, and another for kindlings ; once a week these could 
be replenished as required, when the man came who 
“chored” for us. The “girl’s room” would be a spare 
place that we should find twenty uses for ; it was nice to 
think of it sweet and fresh, empty and available ; very 
nice not to be afraid to remember it was there at all. 

We had a Robinson-Crusoe-like pleasure in making all 
these arrangements ; every clean thing that we put in a 
spotless place upon shelf or nail was a wealth and a com- 
fort to us. Besides, we really did not need half the lum- 
ber of a common kitchen closet ; a china bowl or plate 
would no longer be contraband of war, and Barbara said 
she could stir her blanc-mange with a silver spoon without 
demoralizing anybody to the extent of having the ashes 
taken up with it. 

By Friday night we had got everything to the exact 
and perfect starting-point ; and Mrs. Dunikin went home 
enriched with gifts that were to her like a tin-and- wooden 
wedding; we felt, on our T^rt, that we had celebrated 
ours by clearing them out. 

The bread-box was sweet and empty ; the fragments 
had been all daintily crumbled by Ruth, as she sat, rest* 
ing and talking, when she had come in from her music- 
lesson ; they , lay heaped up like lightly fallen snow, in a 
broad dish, ready to be browned for chicken dressing or 
boiled for brewis or a pudding. Mother never has- any- 
thing between loaves and crumbs when she manages; 
then all is nice, and keeps nice. 


102 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Clean beginnings are beautiful,’’ said Rosamond, look- 
ing around. “ It is the middle that ’s horrid.” 

“We won’t have any middles,” said Ruth. “We ’ll 
keep making clean beginnings, all the way along. That 
is the difference between work and muss.” 

“ If you can,” said Rose, doubtfully. 

I suppose that is what some people will say, after this 
Holabird story is printed so far. Then we just wish they 
could have seen mother make a pudding or get a break- 
fast, that is all. A lady will no more make a jumble or 
litter in doing such things than she would at her dressing- 
table. It only needs an accustomed and delicate touch. 

I will tell you something of how it was. I will take 
that Monday morning — and Monday morning is as good, 
for badness, as you can take — just after we had begun. 

The room was nice enough for breakfast when we left 
it over night. There was nothing straying about ; the 
tea-kettle and the tin boiler were filled, — father did that 
just before he locked up the house ; we had only to draw 
up the window-shades, and let the sweet light in, in the 
morning. 

Stephen had put a basket of wood and kindlings ready 
for Mrs. Dunikin in the kitchen below, and the key of the 
lower door had been left on a beam in the woodshed, by 
agreement. By the time we came down stairs Mrs. Dun- 
ikin had a steaming boiler full of clothes, and had done 
nearly two of her five hours’ work. We should hand her 
her breakfast on a little tray, when the time came, at the 
stair-head ; and she would bring up her cup and plate 
again while we were clearing away. We should pay her 
twelve and a half cents an hour ; she would scrub up all 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


103 


below, go home to dinner, and come again to-morrow for 
five hours’ ironing. That was all there would be about 
Mrs. Dunikin. 

Meanwhile, with a pair of gloves on, and a little plain- 
hemmed three-cornered, dotted-muslin cap tied over her 
hair with a muslin bow behind, mother had let down the 
ashes, — it is n’t a bad thing to do with a well-contrived 
stove, — and set the pan, to which we had a duplicate, 
into the out-room, for Stephen to carry away. Then 
into the clean grate went a handful of shavings and pitch- 
pine kindlings, one or two bits of hard wood, and a sprinkle 
of small, shiny nut-coal. The draughts were put on, and 
in five minutes the coals were red. In these five minutes 
the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed 
up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. 
It was not like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the 
middle of the room with its volcanic margin of cinders 
and ashes. 

Then — that Monday morning — we had brewis to 
make, a little buttered toast to do, and some eggs to 
scramble. The bright coffee-pot got its ration of fragrant, 
beaten paste, — the brown ground kernels mixed with an 
egg, — and stood waiting for its drink of boiling water. 
The two frying-pans came forth ; one was set on with the 
milk for the brewis, into which, when it boiled up white 
and drifting, went the sweet fresh butter, and the salt, 
each in plentiful proportion ; — “ one can give one’s self 
carte-hlanch&r^'* Barbara said, “ than it will do to give a 
girl ” ; — and then the bread-crumbs ; and the end of it 
was, in a white porcelain dish, a light, delicate, savory 
bread-porridge, to eat daintily with a fork, and be thank- 


104 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


ful for. The other pan held eggs, broken in upon bits of 
butter, and sprinkles of pepper and salt ; this went on 
when the coffee-pot — which had got its drink when the 
milk boiled, and been puffing ever since — was ready to 
come off ; over it stood Barbara with a tin spoon, to toss 
up and turn until the whole was just curdled with the 
heat into white and yellow flakes, not one of which was 
raw, nor one was dry. Then the two pans and the coffee- 
pot and the little bowl in which the coffee-paste had been 
beaten and the spoons went off into the pantry-closet, and 
the breakfast was ready ; and only Barbara waited a mo- 
ment to toast and butter the bread, while mother, in her 
place at table, was serving the cups. It was Ruth who 
had set the table, and carried off the cookery things, and 
folded and slid back the little pembroke, that had held 
them beside the stove, into its corner. 

Rosamond had been busy in the brown room ; that was 
all nice now for the day ; and she came in with a little 
glass vase in her hand, in which was a tea-rose, that she 
put before mother at the edge of the white waiter-napkin ; 
and it graced and freshened all the place ; and the smell 
of it, and the bright September air that came in at the 
three cool west windows, overbore all remembrance of the 
cooking and reminder of the stove, from which we were 
seated well away, and before which stood now a square, 
dark green screen that Rosamond had recollected and 
brought down from the garret on Saturday. Barbara and 
her toast emerged from its shelter as innocent of behind- 
the-scenes as any bit of pretty play or pageant. 

Barbara looked very nice this morning, in her brown- 
plaid Scotch gingham trimmed with white braids ; she 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


105 


had brown slippers, also, with bows ; she would not verify 
Rosamond’s prophecy that she “ would be all points,^' now 
that there was an apology for them. I think we were all 
more particular about our outer ladyhood than usual. 

After breakfast the little pembroke was wheeled out 
again, and on it put a steaming pan of hot water. Ruth 
picked up the dishes ; it was something really delicate to 
see her scrape them clean, with a pliant knife, as a painter 
might cleanse his palette, — we had, in fact, a palette- 
knife that we kept for this use when we washed our own - 
dishes, — and then set them in piles and groups before 
mother, on the pembrok^- table. Mother sat in her raised 
arm-chair, as she might sit making tea for company ; she 
had her little mop, and three long, soft clean towels lay 
beside her; we had hemmed a new dozen, so as to have 
plenty from day to day, and a grand D unikin wash at the 
end on the Mondays. 

After the china and glass were done and put up, came 
forth the coffee-pot and the two pans, and had their scald, 
and their little scour, — a teaspoonful of sand must go to 
the daily cleansing of an iron utensil, in mother’s hands ; 
and that was clean work, and the iron thing ne^r got to 
be “ horrid,” any more than a china bowl. It was only 
a little heavy, and it was black ; but the black did not 
come off. It is slopping and burning and putting away 
with a rinse, that makes kettles and spiders untouchable. 
Besides, mother keeps a bottle of ammonia in the pantry, 
to qualify her soap and water with, when she comes to 
things like these. She calls it her kitchen-maid ; it does 
wonders for any little roughness or greasiness ; such soii 
comes off in that, and chemically disappears. 


106 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


It was all dining-room work ; and we were chatty over 
it, as if we had sat down to wind worsteds ; and there was 
no kitchen in the house that morning. 

We kept our butter and milk in the brick buttery at 
the foot of the kitchen stairs. These were all we had to 
go up and down for. Barbara set away the milk, and 
skimmed the cream, and brought up and scalded the yester- 
day’s pans the first thing ; and they were out in a row — 
flashing up saucily at the sun and giving as good as he 
sent — on the back platform. 

She and Rosamond were up stairs, making beds and 
setting straight ; and in an hour after breakfast the house 
was in its beautiful forenoon order, and there was a fore- 
noon of three hours to come. 

We had chickens for dinner that day, I remember ; one 
always does remember what was for dinner the first day 
in a new house, or in new housekeeping. William, the 
chore-man, had killed and picked and drawn them, on 
Saturday ; I do not mean to disguise that we avoided these 
last processes ; we preferred a little foresight of arrange- 
ment. They were hanging in the buttery, with their hearts 
and livers inside them ; mother does not believe in gizzards. 
They only wanted a little salt bath before cooking. 

I should like to have had you see Mrs. Holabird tie up 
those chickens. They were as white and nice as her own 
hands ; and their legs and wings were fastened down to 
their sides, so that they were as round and comfortable 
as dumplings before she had done with them ; and she 
laid them out of her two little palms into the pan in a 
cunning and cosey way that gave them a relish beforehand, 
and sublimated the vulgar need. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


107 


We were tired of sewing and writing and reading in 
three hours ; it was only restful change to come down 
and put the chickens into the oven, and set the dinner- 
table. 

Then, in the broken hour while they were cooking, we 
drifted out upon the piazza, and among our plants in the 
shady east corner by the parlor windows, and Ruth played 
a little, and mother took up the Atlantic, and we felt we 
had a good right to the between-times when the fresh 
dredgings of flour were getting their brown, and after that, 
while the potatoes were boiling. 

Barbara gave us currant-jelly ; she was a stingy Barbara 
about that jelly, and counted her jars ; and when father 
and Stephen came in, there was the little dinner of three 
covers, and a peach-pie of Saturday’s making on the side- 
board, and the green screen up before the ejtove again, 
and the baking-pan safe in the pantry sink, wiih hot water 
and ammonia in it. 

“ Mother,” said Barbara, “ I feel as if we had got rid 
of a menagerie ! ” 

“It is the girl that makes the kitchen,” said Ruth. 

“ And then the kitchen that has to have the girl,” said 
Mrs. Holabird. 

Ruth got up and took away the dishes, and went round 
with the crumb-knife, and did not forget to All the tum- 
blers, nor to put on father’s cheese. 

Our talk went on, and we forgot there was any “ tend- 
ing.” 

“ We did n’t feel all that in the ends of our elbows,” 
said mother in a low tone, smiling upon Ruth as she sat 
down beside her. 


108 


WE GIELS; A HOME STORY. 


“ Nor have to scrinch all up,” said Stephen, quite out 
loud, “ for fear she ’d touch us ! ” 

I ’ll tell you — in confidence — another of our ways at 
Westover; what we did, mostly, after the last two meals, 
to save our afternoons and evenings and our nice dresses. 
We always did it with the tea-things. We just put them, 
neatly piled and ranged in that deep pantry sink ; we 
poured some dipperfuls of hot water over them, and shut 
the cover down ; and the next morning, in our gingham 
gowns, we did up all the dish-washing for the day. 

“Who folded all those clothes?” Why, we girls, of • 
course. But you can’t be told everything in one chapter. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


109 


CHAPTER VII. 

SPRINKLES AND GUSTS. 

RS. DUNIKIN used to bring 
them in, almost all of them, and 
leave them heaped up in the 
large round basket. Then there 
was the second-sized basket, in- 
to which they would all go com- 
fortably when they were folded 
up. 

One Monday night we went 
down as usual ; some of us came 
in, — for we had been playing 
croquet until into the twilight, 
and the Haddens had just gone 
away, so we were later than 
usual at our laundry work. 
Leslie and Harry went round 
with Rosamond to the front 
door ; Ruth slipped in at the 
back, and mother came down 
when she found that Rosamond had not been released. 
Barbara finished setting the tea-table, which she had a 
way of doing in a whiff, put on the sweet loaf upon the 
white trencher, and the dish of raspberry jam and the 



110 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


little silver-wire basket of crisp sugar-cakes, and then 
there was nothing but the tea, which stood ready for 
drawing in the small Japanese pot. Tea was nothing to 
get, ever. 

“ Mother, go back again ! You tired old darling, Ruth 
and I are going to do these ! ” and Barbara plunged in 
among the “ blossoms.” 

That was what we called the fresh, sweet-smelling white 
things. There are a great many pretty pieces of life, if 
you only know about them. Hay-making is one ; and 
rose-gathering is one ; and sprinkling and folding a great 
basket full of white clothes right out of the grass and the 
air and the sunshine is one. 

Mother went olF, — chiefly to see that Leslie and Harry 
were kept to tea, I believe. She knew how to compensate, 
in her lovely little underhand way, with Barbara. 

Barbara pinned up her muslin sleeves to the shoulder, 
shook out a little ruffled short-skirt and put it on for an 
apron, took one end of the long white ironing-table that 
stood across the window, pushed the water-basin into the 
middle, and began with the shirts and the starched things. 
Ruth, opposite, was making the soft underclothing into 
little white rolls. 

Barbara dampened and smoothed and stretched ; she 
almost ironed with her fingers, Mrs. Dunikin said. She 
patted and evened, laid collars and cuffs one above 
another with a sprinkle of drops^ just from her finger-ends, 
between, and then gave a towel a nice equal shower with 
a corn-whisk that she used for the large things, and rolled 
them up in it, hard and fast, with a thump of her round 
pretty fist upon the middle before she laid it by. It w'"3 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Ill 


a clever little process to watch ; and her arms were white 
in the twilight. Girls can’t do all the possible pretty ma- 
noeuvres in the German or out at croquet, if they only 
once knew it. They do find it out in a one-sided sort of 
way ; and then they run to private theatricals. But the 
real every-day scenes are just as nice, only they must have 
their audiences in ones and twos ; perhaps not always 
any audience at all. 

Of a sudden Ruth became aware of an audience of one* 

Upon the balcony, leaning over the rail, looking right 
down into the nearest kitchen window and over Barbara’s 
shoulder, stood Harry Goldthwaite. He shook his head at 
Ruth, and she held her peace. 

Barbara began to sing. She never sang to the piano, — 
only about her work. She made up little snatches, piece- 
meal, of various things, and put them to any sort of words. 
This time it was to her own, — her poem. 

“ I wrote some little books ; 

I said some little says ; 

I preached a little pre-e-each ; 

I lit a little blaze ; 

I made — things — pleasant — in one — little — place.” 

She ran down a most contented little trip, with repeats 
and returns, in a G-octave, for the last line. Then she 
rolled up a bundle of shirts in a square pillow-case, gave 
it its accolade, and pressed it dowm into the basket. 

“How do you suppose, Ruth, we «hall manage the 
town-meetings ? Do you believe they will be as nice as 
this ? Where shall we get our little inspirations, after we 
have come out of all our corners ? ” 

“ We won’t do it,” said Ruth, quietly, shaking out one 


112 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


of mother’s nightcaps, and speaking under the disadvan- 
tage of her private knowledge. 

‘‘ I think they ought to let us vote just once,” said Bar- 
bara ; “to say whether we ever would again. I believe 
we ’re in danger of being put upon now, if we never were ^ 
before.” 

“ It is n’t fair,” said Ruth, with her eyes up out of the 
window at Harry, who made noiseless motion of clapping 
his hands. How could she tell what Barbara would say 
next, or how she would like it when she knew ? 

“ Of course it is n’t,” said Barbara, intent upon the 
gathers of a white cambric waist of Rosamond’s*. “ I 
wonder, Ruth, if we shall have to read all thos& Pub. ’ 
Doc.s that father gets. You see women will make awful 
hard work of it, if they once do go at it ; they are so used ^ 
to doing every — little — thing ” ; and she picked out the 
neck-edging, and smoothed the hem between the buttons. 

“We shall have to take vows, and devote ourselves to 
it,” Barbara went on, as if she were possessed. “ There 
will have to be ‘ Sisters of Polity.’ Not that I ever will. 

I don’t feel a vocation. I ’d rather be a Polly-put-tlie' .. 
kettle-on all the days of my life.” 

“ Mr. Goldthwaite ! ” said Ruth. 

“May I?” asked Harry, as if he had just come, lean- 
ing down over the rail, and speaking to Barbara, who ) 
faced about with a jump. 

She knew by his look ; he could not keep in the fun. 

“ ‘ Ma^ you ’ ? When you have already ! ” 

“ O no, I have n’t ! I mean, come down ? Into the 
one-pleasant-iittle-place, and help ? ” 

“You don’t know the way,” Barbara said, stolidly, 
turning back again, and folding up the waist. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


113 


“ Don’t I ? Which, — to come down, or to help ? ” 
and Harry flung himself over the rail, clasped one hand 
and wrist around a copper water-pipe that ran down there, 
reached the other to something above the window, — the 
mere pediment, I believe, — and swung his feet lightly to 
the sill beneath. Then he dropped himself and sat down, 
close by Barbara’s elbow. 

“ You ’ll get sprinkled,” said she, flourishing the corn- 
whisk over a table-cloth. 

“ I dare say. Or patted, or punched, or something. 
I knew I took the risk of all that when I came down 
amongst it. But it looked nice. I could n’t help it, and 
I don’t care ! ” 

Barbara was thinking of two things, — how long he had 
been there, and what in the world she had said besides 
what she remembered ; and — how she should get ofl* her 
rough-dried apron. 

“ Which do you want, — napkins or pillow-cases ? ” 
and he came round to the basket, and began to pull out. 

“ Napkins,” says Barbara. 

f. The napkins were underneath, and mixed up; while 
he stooped and fumbled, she had the ruffled petticoat off 
over her head. She gave it a shower in such a hurry, 
that as Harry came up with the napkins, he did g^t a 
drift of it in his face. 

“ That won’t do,” said Barbara, quite shocked, and 
tossing the whisk aside. “ There are too many of us.” 

She began on the napkins, sprinkling with her fingers. 
Harry spread up a pile on his part, dipping also into the 
bowl. “ I used to do it when I was a little boy,” he 
said. 




8 


114 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Ruth took the pillow-cases, and so they came to the 
last. They stretched the sheets across the table, and all 
three had a hand in smoothing and showering. 

“ Why, I wish it were n’t all done,” says Harry, turn- 
ing over three clothes-pins in the bottom of the basket, 
while Barbara buttoned her sleeves. “ Where does this 
go ? What a nice place this is ! ” looking round the clean 
kitchen, growing shadowy in the evening light. “ I think 
your house is full of nice places.” 

“ Are you nearly ready, girls ? ” came in mother’s 
voice from above. 

“ Yes, ma’am,” Harry answered back, in an excessive- 
ly cheery way. “We ’re coming” ; and up the stairs all 
three came together, greatly to Mrs. Holabird’s astonish- 
ment. 

“You never know where help is coming from when 
you ’re trying to do your duty,” said Barbara, in a high- 
moral way. “ Prince Percinet, Mrs. Holabird.” 

“ Miss Polly-put — ” began Harry Goldthwaite, brim- 
ming up with a half-diffident mischief. But Barbara 
walked round to her place at the table with a very great 
dignity. 

People think that young folks can only have properly 
arranged and elaborately provided good times ; with Ger- 
mania band pieces, and bouquets and ribbons for the Ger- 
man, and oysters and salmon-salad and sweatmeat-and- 
spun-sugar “ chignons ” ; at least, commerce games and 
bewitching little prizes. Yet when lives just touch each 
other naturally, as it were, — dip into each other’s little 
interests and doings, and take them as they are, what a 
multiplication-table of opportunities it opens up ! You 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


115 


may happen upon a good time any minute, then. Neigh- 
borhoods used to go on in that simple fashion ; life used 
to he “ co-operative.” 

Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry 
had gone away. 

“ Only you can’t get them into it again,” objected 
Eosamond. “ It ’s a case of Huinpty Dumpty. The 
world will go on.” 

“ One world will,” said Barbara. “ But the world is 
manifold. You can set up any kind of a monad you like, 
and a world will shape itself round it. You ’ve just got 
to live your own way, and everything that belongs to it 
will be sure to join on. You ’ll have a world before you 
know it. I think myself that ’s what the Ark means, and 
Mount Ararat, and the Noachian — don’t they call it ? — 
new foundation. That ’s the way they got up New Eng- 
land, anyhow.” 

“ Barbara, what flights you take ! ” 

“Do I? Well, we have to. The world lives up 
nineteen flights now, you know, besides the old broken- 
down and buried ones.” 

It was a few days after that, that the news came to 
mother of Aunt Radford’s illness, and she had to go 
up to Oxenham. Father went with her, but he came 
back the same night. Mother had made up her mind 
to stay a week. And so we had to keep house without 
her. 

One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down. I 
don’t know why, but if ever mother did happen to be out 
of the way, it seemed as if he took the time to talk over 
special affairs with father. Yet he thought everything of 


116 WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 

“ Mrs. Stephen,” too, and he quite relied upon her judg- 
ment and influence. But I think old men do often feel as 
if they had got their sons back again, quite to themselves, 
when the Mrs. Stephens or the Mrs. Johns leave them alone 
for a little. 

At any rate. Grandfather Holabird sat with father on 
the north piazza, out of the way of the strong south-wind ; 
and he had out a big wallet, and a great many papers, and 
he stayed and stayed, from just after dinner-time till almost 
the middle of the afternoon, so that father did not go down 
to his office at all ; and when old Mr. Holabird went home 
at last, he walked over with him. Just after they had 
gone Leslie Goldthwaite and Harry stopped, “ for a min- 
ute only,” the}' said ; for the south- wind had brought up 
clouds, and there was rain threatening. That was. how 
we all happened to be just as we were that night of the 
September gale ; for it was the September gale of last year 
that was coming. 

The wind had been queer, in gusts, all day ; yet the 
weather had been soft and mild. We had opened windows 
for the pleasant air, and shut them again in a hurry when 
the papers blew about, and the pictures swung to and fro 
against the walls. Once that afternoon, somebody had left 
doors open through the brown room and the dining-room, 
where a window was thrown up, as we could have it there 
where the three were all on one side. Ruth was coming 
down stairs, and saw grandfather’s papers give a whirl 
out of his lap and across the piazza floor upon the gravel. 
If she had not sprung so quickly and gathered them all up 
for him, some of them might have blown quite away, and 
led father a chase after them over the hill. After that, 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


117 



old Mr. Holabird put them up in his wallet again, and 
when they had talked a few minutes more they went off 
together to the old house. 

It was wonderful how that wind and rain did come up. 
The few minutes that Harry and Leslie stopped with us, 
and then the few more they took to consider whether it 
would do for Leslie to try to walk home, just settled it 
that nobody could stir until there should be some sort of 
lull or holding up. 

Out of the far southerly hills came the blast, rending 
and crashing ; the first swirls of rain that flung themselves 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


il8 

against our windows seemed as if they might have rushed 
ten miles, horizontally, before they got a chance to drop ; 
the trees bent down and sprang again, and lashed the air 
to and fro ; chips and leaves and fragments of all strange 
sorts took the wonderful opportunity and went soaring 
aloft and onward in a false, plebeian triumph. 

The rain came harder, in great streams ; but it all went 
by in white, wavy drifts ; it seemed to rain from south to 
north across the country, — not to fall from heaven to 
earth ; we wondered if it would fall anywhere. It beat 
against the house ; that stood up in its way ; it rained 
straight in at the window-sills and under the doors ; we ran 
about the house with cloths and sponges to sop it up from 
cushions and carpets. 

“ I say, Mrs. Housekeeper ! ” called out Stephen from 
above, “ look out for father’s dressing-room ! It ’s all 
afloat, — hair-brushes out on voyages of discovery, and a 
horrid little kelpie sculling round on a hat-box ! ” 

Father’s dressing-room was a windowed closet, in the 
corner space beside the deep, old-fashioned chimney. It 
had hooks and shelves in one end, and a round shaving- 
stand and a chair in the other. We had to pull down all 
his clothes and pile them upon chairs, and stop up the 
window with an old blanket. A pane was cracked, and 
the wind, although its force was slanted here, had blown 
it in, and the fine driven spray was dashed across, diago- 
nally, into the very farthest corner. 

In the room a gentle cascade descended beside the 
chimney, and a picture had to be taken down. Down 
stairs the dining-room sofa, standing acrpss a window, got 
a little lake in the middle of it before we knew. The side - 




WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


119 


door blew open with a bang, and hats, coats, and shawls 
went scurrying from their pegs, through sitting-room and 
hall, like a flight of scared, living things. We were like 
a little garrison in a great fort, besieged at ail points at 
once. We had to bolt doors, — latches were uothing, — 
and bar shutters. And when we could pau^je indoors, 
what a froth and whirl we had to gaze out at 1 

The grass, all along the fields, was white, prostrate ; 
swept fiercely one way ; every blade stretched out help- 
less upon its green face. The little pear-trees, heavy 
with fruit, lay prone in literal ‘‘ windrows.” The great 
ashes and walnuts twisted and writhed, and had their 
branches stripped upward of their leaves, as a child might 
draw a head of blossoming grass between his thumb and 
finger. The beautiful elms were in a wild agony ; their 
graceful little bough-tips were all snapped off and whirled 
away upon the blast, leaving them in a ragged blight. A 
great silver poplar went over by the fence, carrying the 
posts and palings with it, and upturned a huge mass of 
roots and earth, that had silently cemented itself for half 
a century beneath the sward. Up and down, between 
Grandfather Holabird’s home-field and ours, fallen locusts 
and wild cherry-trees made an abatis. Over and through 
all swept the smiting, powdery, seething storm of waters ; 
the air was like a sea, tossing and foaming ; we could only 
see through it by snatches, to cry out that this and that 
had happened. Down below us, the roof was lifted from 
a barn, and crumpled up in a heap half a furlong off, 
against some rocks ; and the hay was flying in great locks 
through the air. 

It began to grow dark. We put a bright, steady light 


120 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


in the brown room, to shine through the south window, 
and show father that we were all right ; directly af- 
ter a lamp was set in Grandfather Holabird’s north 
porch. This little telegraphy was all we could manage; 
we were as far apart as if the Atlantic were between 
us. 

“Will they be frightened about you at home ? ’’ asked 
Ruth of Leslie. 

“ I think not. They will know we should go in some- 
where, and that there would be no way of getting out 
again. People must be caught everywhere, just as it 
happens, to-night.” 

“ It ’s just the jolliest turn-up ! ” cried Stephen, who 
had been in an ecstasy all the time. “ Let ’s make mo- 
lasses-candy, and sit up all night ! ” 

Between eight and nine we had some tea. The wind 
had lulled a little from its hurricane force ; the rain had 
stopped. 

“ It had all been blown to Canada, by this time,” 
Harry Goldthwaite said. “ That rain never stopped any- 
where short, except at the walls and windows.” 

True enough, next morning, when we went out, the 
grass was actually dry. I 

It was nearly ten when Stephen went to the south win- 
dow and put his hands up each side of his face against the 
glass, and cried out that there was a lantern coming over 
from grandfather’s. Then we all went and looked. 

It came slowly ; once or twice it stopped ; and once it 
moved down hill at right angles quite a long way. That 
is where the trees are down,” we said. But presently it 
took an unobstructed diagonal, and came steadily on to 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


121 


the long piazza steps, and up to the side door that opened 
upon the little passage to the dining-room. 

We thought it was father, of course, and we all hurried 
to the door to let him in, and at the same time to make 
it nearly impossible that he should enter at all. But it 
was Grandfather Holabird’s man, Robert. 

“ The old gentleman has been taken bad,” he said. 
“ Mr. Stephen wants to know if you ’re all comfortable, 
and he won’t come till Mr. Holabird ’s better. I ’ve got 
to go to the town for the doctor.” 

“ On foot, Robert ? ” 

“ Sure. There ’s no other way. I take it there ’s many 
a good winter’s firing of wood down across the road atwixt 
here and there. There ain’t much knowing where you 
can get along.” 

“ But what is it ? ” 

“ We mustn’t keep him,” urged Barbara. 

“ No, I ain’t goin’ to be kep’. ’T won’t do. I donno 
what it is. It ’s a kind of a turn. He ’s cornin’ partly 
out of it ; but it ’s bad. He had a kind of a warnin’ once 
before. It ’s his head. They ’re afraid it ’s appalectic, or 
paralettic, or sunthin’.” 

Robert looked very sober. He quite passed by the won- 
der of the gale, that another time would have stirred him 
to most lively speech. Robert “ thought a good deal,” as 
he expressed it, of Grandfather Holabird. 

Harry Goldthwaite came through the brown room with 
his hat in his hand. How he ever found it we could not 
tell. 

“ I ’ll go with him,” he said. “ You won’t he afraid 
now, will you, Barbara ? I’m very sorry about Mr. Hol- 
ahird.” 


122 


WE GIBLS-. A HOME STORY. 


He shook hands with Barbara, — it chanced that she 
stood nearest, — bade us all good night, and went away. 
We turned back silently into the brown room. 

We were all quite hushed from our late excitement. 
What strange things were happening to-night ! 

All in a moment something so solemn and important 
was put into our minds. An event that, — never talked 
about, and thought of as little, I suppose, as such a one 
ever was in any family like ours, — had yet always 
loomed vaguely afar, as what should come some time, and 
would bring changes when it came, was suddenly im- 
pending. 

Grandfather might be going to die. 

And yet what w^as there for us to do but to go quietly 
back into the brown room and sit down ? 

There was nothing to say even. There never is any- 
thing to say about the greatest things. People can only 
name the bare, grand, awful fact, and say, “ It was tre- 
mendous,” or “ startling,” or “ magnificent,” or “ terri- 
ble,” or “ sad.” How little we could really say about the 
gale, even now that it was over ! We could repeat that 
this and that tree were blowm down, and such a barn or 
house unroofed ; but we could not get the real wonder of 
it — the thing that moved us to try to talk it over — into 
any words. 

“ He seemed so well this afternoon,” said Rosamond. 

“ I don’t think he wm quite well,” said Ruth. “ His 
hands trembled so when he was folding up his papers ; 
and he was very slow.” 

“ O, men always are with their fingers. I don’t think 
that was anything,” said Barbara. “ But I think he 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


123 


seemed rather nervous when he came over. And he 
would not sit in the house, though the wind was coming 
up then. He said he liked the air ; and he and father got 
the shaker chairs up there by the front door ; and he sat 
and pinched his knees together to make a lap to hold his 
papers ; it was as much as he could manage ; no wonder 
his hands trembled.’’ 

“ I wonder what they were talking about,” said Rosa- 
mond. 

“ I ’m glad Uncle Stephen went home with him,” said 
Ruth. 

“ I wonder if we shall have this house to live in if 
grandfather should die,” said Stephen, suddenly. It 
could not have been his first thought ; he had sat soberly 
silent a good while. 

“ O Stevie ! don't let ’s think anything about that ! ” 
said Ruth ; and nobody else answered at all. 

We sent Stephen off to bed, and we girls sat round the 
fire, which we had made up in the great open fireplace, 
till twelve o’clock ; then we all went up stairs, leaving the 
^ side door unfastened. Ruth brought some pillows and 
comfortables into Rosamond and Barbara’s room, made up 
a couch for herself on the box-sofa, and gave her little 
white one to Leslie. We kept the door open between. 
We could see the light in grandfather’s northwest cham- 
ber ; and the lamp was still burning in the porch below. 
W e could not possibly know anything ; whether Robert 
had got back, and the doctor had come, — whether he 
was better or worse, — whether father would come home 
to-night. We could only guess. 

“ O Leslie, it is so good you are, here ! ” we said. 


124 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck 
and confusion of the storm, in our loneliness without fa- 
ther and mother, and in the possible awfulness and change 
that were so near, — -over there in Grandfather Holabird’s 
lighted room. 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


125 


CHAPTER VIII. 

HALLOWEEN. 


REAKFAST was late the next 
morning. It had been nearly 
two o’clock when father had 
come home. He told us that 
grandfather was better ; that it 
w^as what the doctor called a 
premonitory attack ; that he 
might have another and more 
serious one any day, or that 
he might live on for years with- 
out a repetition. For the pres- 
ent he was to be kept as easy 
and quiet as possible, and grad- 
ually allowed to resume his old 
habits as his strength permit- 
ted. 

Mother came back in a few 
days more ; Aunt Radford also 
was better. The family fell in- 
to the old ways again, and it was as if no change had 
threatened. Father told mother, however, something of 
importance that grandfather had said to him that after- 
noon, before he was taken ill. He had been on the point of 



126 


WE GIRLS ; A HOME STORY. 


showing him something which he looked for among his 
papers, just before the wind whirled them out of his 
hands. He had almost said he would complete and give 
it to him at once ; and then, when they were interrupted, 
he had just put everything up again, and they had walked 
over home together. Then there had been the excite- 
ment of the gale, and grandfather had insisted upon going 
to the barns himself to see that all was made properly fast, 
and had come back all out of breath, and had been taken 
with that ill turn in the midst of the storm. 

The paper he w*as going to show to father was an un- 
witnessed deed of gift. He had thought of securing to us 
this home, by giving it in trust to father for his wife and 
children. 

“ I helped John into his New York business,’’ he said, 
by investing money in it that he has had the use of, at 
Enoderate interest, ever since ; and Roderick and his wife 
have had their home with me. None of my boys ever 
paid me any hoard. I sha’ n’t make a will ; the law gives 
things where they belong ; there ’s nothing but this that 
wants evening ; and so I ’ve been thinking about it. 
What you do with your share of my other property when 
you get it is no concern of mine as I know of ; but I 
should like to give you something in such a shape that it 
could n’t go for old debts. I never undertook to shoulder 
any of them ; what little I ’ve done was done for you. I 
wrote out the paper myself; I never go to lawyers. I 
suppose it would stand clear enough for honest compre- 
hension, — and Roderick and John are both honest, — if 
I left it as it is ; but perhaps I ’d as well take it some day 
to Squire Hadden, and swear to it, and then hand it over 
\o you. I ’ll see about it.” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


127 


That was what grandfather had said ; mother told 
ns all about it ; there were no secret committees in 
our domestic congress ; all was done in open house ; we 
knew all the hopes and the perplexities, only they came 
round to us in due order of hearing. But father had not 
really seen the paper, after all ; and after grandfather got 
well, he never mentioned it again all that winter. The 
wonder was that he had mentioned it at all. 

“ He forgets a good many things, since his sickness,’’ 
father said, “ unless something comes up to remind him. 
But there is the paper ; he must come across that.” 

He may change his mind,” said mother, “ even when 
he does recollect. We can be sure of nothing.” 

But we grew more fond than ever of the old, sunshiny 
house. In October Harry Goldthwaite went away again 
on a year’s cruise. 

Rosamond had a letter from Mrs. Van Alstyne, from 
New York. She folded it up after she had read it, and 
did not tell us anything about it. She answered it next 
day ; and it was a month later when one night up stairs 
she began something she had to say about our winter 
shopping with, — 

“ If I had gone to New York — ” and there she 
stopped, as if she had accidentally said what she did not 
intend. 

“ If you had gone to New York ! Why ! When?” 
cried Barbara. “ What do you mean ? ” 

“ Nothing,” Rosamond answered, in a vexed way. 
“ Mrs. Van. Alstyne asked me, that is all. Of course I 
could n’t.” 

“ Of course you ’re just a glorious old mhlesse ohlige-di ! 


128 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Why did n’t you say something ? You might have gone 
perhaps. We could all have helped. I’d have lent 
you — that garnet and white silk ! ” 

Rosamond would not say anything more, and she would 
scarcely be kissed. 

After all, she had co-operated more than any of us. 
Rose was always the daughter who objected and then did. 
I have often thought that young man in Scripture ought 
to have been a woman. It is more a woman’s way. 

The maples were in their gold and vermilion now, and 
the round masses of the ash were shining brown ; we 
filled the vases with their leaves, and pressed away more 
in all the big books we could confiscate, and hunted frosted 
ferns in the wood-edge, and had beautiful pine blazes 
morning and evening in the brown room, and began to 
think how pleasant, for many cosey things, the winter was 
going to be, out here at W estover. 

“ How nicely we could keep Halloween,” said Ruth, 
“ round this great open chimney ! What a row of nuts 
we could burn ! ” 

“ So we will,” said Rosamond. “We ’ll ask the girls. 
May n’t we, mother ? ” 

“ To tea?” 

“No. Only to the fun, — and some supper. We can 
have that all ready in the other room.” 

“ They ’ll see the cooking-stove.” 

“ They won’t know it, when they do,” said Barbara. 

“We might have the table in the front room,” sug- 
gested Ruth. 

“ The drawing-room ! ” cried Rosamond. “ That 
wovld be a make-shift. Who ever heard of having supper 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY, 


129 


there ? No ; we ’ll have both rooms open, and a bright 
fire in each, and one up in mother’s room for them to take 
off their things. And there ’ll be the piano, and the ster- 
eoscope, and the games, in the parlor. We ’ll begin in 
there, and out here we ’ll have the fortune tricks and the 
nuts later ; and then the supper, bravely and comfortably, 
in the dining-room, where it belongs. If they get fright- 
ened at anything, they can go home ; I ’m going to new 
cover that screen, though, mother ; And I ’ll tell you 
what with, — that piece of goldy-brown damask up in the 
cedar-trunk. And I ’ll put an arabesque of crimson braid 
around it for a border, and the room will be all goldy- 
brown and crimson then, and nobody will stop to think 
which is brocade and which is waterproof. They ’ll be 
sitting on the waterproof, you know, and have the bro- 
cade to look at. It ’s just old enough to seem as if it had 
always been standing round somewhere.” 

“ It will be just the kind of party for us to have,” said 
Barbara. 

“ They could n’t have it up there, if they tried. It 
would be sure to be Marchbanksy.” 

Rosamond smiled contentedly. She was beginning to 
recognize her own special opportunities. She was quite 
conscious of her own tact in utilizing them. 

But then came the intricate questions of who ? and who 
not? 

Not everybody, of course,” said Rose, “ That would 
be a confusion. Just the neighbors, — right around 
here.” 

“ That takes in the Hobarts, and leaves out Leslie 
Goldthwaite,” said Ruth, quietly. ^ 


13P 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ 0, Leslie will be at the Haddens’, or here,” replied 
Rosamond. “ Grace Hobart is nice,” she went on ; “ if 
only she would n’t be ‘ real ’ nice ! ” 

“ That is just the word for her, though,” said Ruth. 
“ The Hobarts are real.” 

Rosamond’s face gathered over. It was not easy to 
reconcile things. She liked them all, each in their way. 
If they would only all come, and like each other. 

“ What is it. Rose ? ’ said Barbara, teasing. “ Your 
brows are knit, — your nose is crocheted, — and your 
mouth is — tatted ! I shall have to come and ravel you 
out.” 

“ I ’m thinking ; that is all.” 

“ How to build the fence ? ” 

“ What fence ? ” 

“ That fence round the pond, — the old puzzle. There 
was once a pond, and four men came and built four little 
houses round it, — close to the w’ater. Then four other 
men came and built four big houses, exactly behind the 
first ones. They wanted the pond all to themselves ; but 
the little people were nearest to it ; how could they build 
the fence, you know ? They had to squirm it awfully ! 
You see the plain, insignificant people are so apt to be 
nearest the good time ! ” 

“ I like to satisfy everybody.” 

“ You won’t, — with a squirm-fence ! ” 

If it had not been for Ruth, we should have gone on 
just as innocently as possible, and invited them — March- 
bankses and all — to our Halloween frolic. But Ruth 
was such a little news-picker, with her music lessons? 
She had five scholars now ; beside Lily and Reba, there 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


131 


were Elsie Hobart and little Frank Henaee, and Pen 
Pennington, a girl of her own age, who had come all the 
way from Fort Vancouver, over the Pacific Railroad, to 
live here with her grandmother. Between the four 
houses, Ruth heard everything. 

All Saints’ Day fell on Monday ; the Sunday made 
double hallowing, Barbara said ; and Saturday was the 
“E’en.” We did not mean to invite until Wednesday; 
on Tuesday Ruth came home and told us that Olivia and 
Adelaide Marchbanks were getting up a Halloween 
themselves, and that the Haddens were asked already; 
and that Lily and Reba were in transports because they 
were to be allowed to go. 

“ Did you say anything?” asked Rosamond. 

“ Yes. I suppose I ought not ; but Elinor was in the 
room, and I spoke before I thought.” 

“ What did you tell her ? ” 

“ I only said it was such a pity ; that you meant to ask 
them all. And Elinor said it would be so nice here. If 
it were anybody else, we might try to arrange some- 
thing.” 

But how could we meddle with the Marchbankses ? 
With Olivia and Adelaide, of all the Marchbankses ? 
We could not take it for granted that they meant to ask 
us. There was no such thing as suggesting a compro- 
mise. Rosamond looked high and splendid, and said not 
another word. 

In the afternoon of Wednesday Adelaide and Maud 
Marchbanks rode by, homeward, on their beautiful little 
brown, long- tailed Morgans. 

“ They don’t mean to,” said Barbara. “ If they did, 
they would have stopped.” 


132 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Perhaps they will send a note to-morrow,” said Ruth. 

“ Do you think I am waiting, in hopes ? ” asked Rosa- 
mond, in her clearest, quietest tones. 

Pretty soon she came in with her hat on. “ I am going 
over to invite the Hobarts,” she said. 

“ That will settle it, whatever happens,” said Barbara. 

“ Yes,” said Rosamond ; and she walked out. 

The Hobarts were ‘‘ ever so much obliged to us ; and 
they would certainly come.” Mrs. Hobart lent Rosa- 
mond an old English book of “ Holiday Sports and Ob- 
servances,” with ten pages of Halloween charms in it. 

From the Hobarts’ house she walked on into Z , 

and asked Leslie Goldthwaite and Helen Josselyn, beg- 
ging Mrs. Ingleside to come too, if she would ; the doctor 
would call for them, of course, and should have his sup- 
per ; but it was to be a girl-party in the early evening. 

Leslie was not at home ; Rosamond gave the message 
to her mother. Then she met Lucilla Waters in the 
street. 

“ I was just thinking of you,” she said. She did not 
say, “ coming to you,” for truly, in her mind, she had 
not decided it. But seeing her gentle, refined face, pale 
always with the life that had little frolic in it, she spoke 
right out to that, without deciding. 

“We want you at our Halloween party on Saturday. 
Will you come ? You will have Helen and the Ingle- 
sides to come with, and perhaps Leslie.” 

Rosamond, even while delivering her message to Mrs. 
Goldthwaite for Leslie, had seen an unopened note lying 
upon the table, addressed to her in the sharp, tall hand of 
Olivia Marchbanks. 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


133 


She stopped in at the Haddens, told them how sorry 
she had been to find they were promised ; asked if it were 
any use to go to the Hendees’ ; and when Elinor said, 
“ But you will be sure to be asked to the Marchbankses 
yourselves,” replied, “ It is a pity they should come to- 
gether, but we had quite made up our minds to have this 
little frolic, and we have begun, too, you see.” 

Then she did go to the Hendees’, although it was 
dark ; and Maria Hendee, who seldom went out to par- 
ties, promised to come. “ They would divide,” she said. 
“ Fanny might go to Olivia’s. Holiday-keeping was dif- 
ferent from other invites. One might take liberties.” 

Now the Hendees were people who could take liberties, 
if anybody. Last of all, Rosamond went in and asked 
Pen Pennington. 

It was Thursday, just at dusk, when Adelaide March- 
banks walked over, at last, and proffered her invitation. 

“ You had better all come to us,” she said, graciously. 
‘‘ It is a pity to divide. We want the same people, of 
course, — the Hendees, and the Haddens, and Leslie.” 
She hardly attempted to disguise that we ourselves were 
an afterthought. 

Rosamond told her, very sweetly, that we were obliged, 
but that she was afraid it was quite too late ; we had 
asked others ; the Hobarts, and the Inglesides ; one or 
two whom Adelaide did not know, — Helen Josselyn, 
and Lucilla Waters; the parties would not interfere 
much, after all. 

Rosamond took up, as it were, a little sceptre of her 
own, from that moment. 

Leslie Goldthwaite had been away for three days, stay- 


134 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


ing with her friend, Mrs. Frank Scherman, in Boston. 
She had found Olivia’s note, of Monday evening, when 
she returned ; also, she heard of Rosamond’s verbal in- 
vitation. Leslie was very bright about these things. She 
saw in a moment how it had been. Her mother told her 
what Rosamond had said of who were coming, — the Ho- 
barts and Helen ; the rest were not then asked.” 

Olivia did not like it very well, — that reply of Les- 
lie’s. She showed it to Jeannie Hadden ; that was how 
we came to know of it. 

“ Please forgive me,” the note ran, “ if I accept Rosa- 
mond’s invitation for the very reason that might seem to 
oblige me to decline it. I see you have two days’ advan- 
tage of her, and she will no doubt lose some of the girls by 
that. I really heard hers first. I wish very much it 
were possible to have both pleasures.” 

That was being terribly true and independent with 

West Z . “ But Leslie Goldthwaite,” Barbara said, 

always was as brave as a little bumble-bee ! ” 

How it had come over Rosamond, though, we could 
not quite understand. It was not pique, or rivalry ; 
there was no excitement about it ; it seemed to be a pure, 
spirited dignity of her own, which she all at once, quietly 
and of course, asserted. 

Mother said something about it to her Saturday morn- 
ing, when she was beating up Italian cream, and Rosa- 
mond was cutting chicken for the salad. The cakes and 
the jellies had been made the day before. 

“ You have done this, Rosamond, in a very right and 
neighborly way, but it is n’t exactly your old way. Hom^ 
came you not to mind ? ” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


135 


Rosamond did not discuss the matter ; she only smiled 
and said, “ I think, mother, I ’m growing very proud and 
self-sufficient, since we ’ve had real, ihrougli-and-ihrough 
ways of our own.” 

It was the difference between “ somewhere ” and “be- 
twixt and between.” 

Miss Elizabeth Pennington came in while we were 
putting candles in the bronze branches, and Ruth was 
laying an artistic fire in the wide chimney. Ruth could 
make a picture with her crossed and balanced sticks, slop- 
ing the firm-built pile backward to the two great, solid 
logs behind, — a picture which it only needed the touch 
of flame to finish and perfect. Then the dazzling fire- 
wreaths curled and clasped through and about it all, fill- 
ing the spaces with a rushing splendor, and reaching up 
their vivid spires above its compact body to an outline of 
complete live beauty. Ruth’s fires satisfied you to look 
at : and they never tumbled down. 

She rose up with a little brown, crooked stick in one 
hand, to speak to Miss Pennington. 

“ Don’t mind me,” said the lady. “ Go on, please, 
‘ biggin’ your castle.’ That will be a pretty sight to see, 
when it lights up.” 

Ruth liked crooked sticks ; they held fast by each 
other, and they made pretty curves and openings. So 
she went on, laying them deftly. 

“ 1 should like to be here to-night,” said Miss Elizabeth, 
stiii looking at the fire-pile. “ Would you let an old maid 
in?” 

“ Miss Pennington ! Would you come ? ” 

“ I took it in my head to want to. That was why 


136 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


I came over. Are you going to play snap-dragon ? I 
wondered if you had thought of that.” 

“We don’t know about it,” said Ruth. “ Anything, 
that is, except the name.” 

“ That is just what I thought possible. Nobody knows 
those old games nowadays. May I come and bring a great 
dragon-bowl with me, and superintend that part ? Mother 
got her fate out of a snap-dragon, and we have the identi- 
cal bowl. We always used to bring' it out at Christmas, 
when we were all at home.” 

“ O Miss Pennington ! How perfectly lovely ! How 
good you are ! ” 

“ Well, I ’m glad you take it so. I was afraid it was 
terribly meddlesome. But the fancy — or the memory — 
seized me.” 

How wonderfully our Halloween party was turning 
out! 

And the turning-out is almost the best part of anything ; 
the time when things are getting together, in the beauti- 
ful prosperous way they will take, now and then, even in 
this vexed world. 

There was our lovely little supper- table all ready. 
People who have servants enough, high-trained, to do 
these things while they are entertaining in the drawing- 
room, don’t have half the pleasure, after all, that we do, 
in setting out hours beforehand, and putting the last 
touches and taking the final satisfaction before we go to 
dress. 

The cake, with the ring in it, was in the middle ; for 
we had put together all the fateful and pretty customs we 
could think of, from whatever holiday ; there were moth* 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


137 


er’s Italian creams, and amber and garnet wine jellies ; 
there were sponge and lady-cake, and the little macaroons 
and cocoas that Barbara had the secret of ; and the salad, 
of spring chickens and our own splendid celery, was ready 
in the cold room, with its bowl of delicious dressing to be 
poured over it at the last ; and the scalloped oysters were 
in the pantry ; Ruth was to put them into the oven again 
when the time came, and mother would pin the white 
napkins around the dishes, and set them on ; and nobody 
was to worry or get tired with having the whole to think 
of ; and yet the whole would be done, to the very light- 
ing of the candles, which Stephen had spoken for, by this 
beautiful, organized co-operation of ours. Truly it is a 
charming thing, — all to itself, in a family ! 

To be sure, we had coffee and bread and butter and 
cold ham for dinner that day ; and we took our tea 
“ standed round,” as Barbara said ; and the dishes were 
put away in the covered sink ; we knew where we could 
shirk righteously and in good order, when we could not 
accomplish everything ; but there was neither huddle nor 
hurry ; we were as quiet and comfortable as we could be. 
Even Rosamond was satisfied with the very manner ; to 
be composed is always to be elegant. Anybody might 
have come in and lunched with us ; anybody might have 
shared that easy, chatty cup of tea. 

The front parlor did not amount to much, after all, 
pleasant and pretty as it was for the first receiving ; we 
were all too eager for the real business of the evening. It 
was bright and warm with the wood-fire and the lights ; 
and the white curtains, nearly filling up three of its walls, 
made it very festal-looking. There was the open piano^ 


138 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


and Ruth played a little ; there was the stereoscope, and 
some of the girls looked over the new views of Catskill 
and the Hudson that Dakie Thayne had given us ; there 
was the table with cards, and we played one game of 
Old Maid, in which the Old Maid got lost mysteriously 
into the drawer, and everybody was married ; and then 
Miss Pennington appeared at the door, with her man-ser- 
vant behind her, and there was an end. She took the 
big bowl, pinned over with a great damask napkin, out of 
the man’s hands, and went off privately with Barbara into 
the dining-room. 

“ This is the Snap,” she said, unfastening the cover, and 
producing from within a paper parcel. “ And that,” 
holding up a little white bottle, “ is the Dragon.” And 
Barbara set all away in the dresser until after supper. 
Then we got together, without further ceremony, in the 
brown room. 

We hung wedding-rings — we had mother’s, and Miss 
Elizabeth had brought over Madam Pennington’s — by 
hairs, and held them inside tumblers ; and they vibrated 
with our quickening pulses, and swung and swung, until 
they rung out fairy chimes of destiny against the sides. 
We floated needles in a great basin of water, and gave 
them names, and watched them turn and swim and draw 
together, — some point to point, some heads and points, 
some joined cosily side to side, while some drifted to the 
margin and clung there all alone, and some got tears in 
their eyes, or an interfering jostle, and went down. We 
melted lead and poured it into water ; and it took strange 
shapes ; of spears and masts and stars ; and some all 
went to money ; and one was a queer little bottle and 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


13 ^^ 

pills, and one was pencils and artists’ tubes, and — really 
— a little palette with a hole in it. 

And then came the chestnut-roasting, before the bright 
red coals. Each girl put down a pair ; and I dare say 
most of them put down some little secret, girlish thought 
with it. The ripest nuts burned steadiest and surest, of 
course; but how could we tell these until we tried? 
Some little crack, or unseen worm-hole, would keep one 
still, while its companion would pop off, away from it ; 
some would take flight together, and land in like manner, 
without ever parting company ; these were to go some 
long way off ; some never moved from where they began, 
but burned up, stupidly and peaceably, side by side. 



140 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY; 


Some snapped into the fire. Some went off into corners. 
Some glowed beautiful, and some burned black, and some 
got covered up with ashes. 

Barbara’s pair were ominously still for a time, when 
all at once the larger gave a sort of unwilling lurch, with- 
out popping, and rolled oflP a little way, right in toward the 
blaze. 

“ Gone to a warmer climate,” whispered Leslie, like a 
tease. And then crack ! the warmer climate, or some- 
thing else, sent him back again, with a real bound, just as 
Barbara’s gave a gentle little snap, and they both dropped 
quietly down against the fender together. 

“What made that jump back, I wonder?” said Pen 
Pennington. 

“ O, it was n’t more than half cracked when it went 
away,” said Stephen, looking on. 

Who would be bold enough to try the looking-glass ? 
To go out alone with it into the dark field, walking back- 
ward, saying the rhyme to the stars which if there had 
been a moon ought by right to have been said to her : — 

“ Round and round, 0 stars so fair ! 

Ye travel, and search out everywhere. 

I pray you, sweet stars, now show to me, 

This night, who my future husband shall he ! ” 

Somehow, we put it upon Leslie. She was the oldest ; 
we made that the reason. 

“ I would n’t do it for anything ! ” said Sarah Hobart. 
“ I heard of a girl who tried it once, and saw a shroud ! ” 

But Leslie was full of fun that evening, and ready to 
do anything. She took the little mirror that Ruth brought 
her from up stairs, put on a shawl, and we all went to the 
front door with her, to see her off. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


141 


‘‘ Round the piazza, and down the bank,” said Barbara, 
“ and backward all the way.” 

So Leslie backed out at the door, and we shut it upon 
her. The instant after, we heard a great laugh. Off the 
piazza, she had stepped backward, directly against two 
gentlemen coming in. 

Doctor Ingleside was one, coming to get his supper ; 

the other was a friend of his, just arrived in Z . 

“ Doctor John Hautayne,” he said, introducing him by his 
full name. 

We knew why. He was proud of it. Doctor John 
Hautayne was the army surgeon who had been with him 
in the Wilderness, and had ridden a stray horse across 
a battle-field, in his shirt-sleeves, right in front of a Rebel 
battery, to get to some wounded on the other side. And 
the Rebel gunners, holding their halyards, stood still and 
shouted. 

It put an end to the tricks, except the snap-dragon. 

We had not thought how late it was; but mother and 
Ruth had remembered the oysters. 

Doctor John Hautayne took Leslie out to supper. We 
saw him look at her with a funny, twinkling curiosity, as 
he stood there with her in the full light ; and we all thought 
we had never seen Leslie look prettier in all her life. 

After supper. Miss Pennington lighted up her Dragon, 
and threw in her snaps. A very little brandy, and a bowl 
full of blaze. 

Maria Hendee “ snapped ” first, and got a preserved 
date. 

“Ancient and honorable,” said Miss Pennington, laugh- 
ing. 


142 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Then Pen Pennington tried, and got nothing. 

“ You thought of your own fingers,” said her aunt. 

“ A fig for my fortune ! ” cried Barbara, holding up her 
trophy. 

“ It came from the Mediterranean,” said Mrs. Ingleside, 
over her shoulder into her ear ; and the ear burned. 

Ruth got a sugared almond. 

“ Only a hernel^'^ said the meriy doctor’s wife, again. 

The doctor himself tried, and seized a slip of candied 
flag. 

“ Warm-hearted and useful, that is all,” said Mrs. In- 
gleside. 

“ And tolerably pungent,” said the doctor. 

Doctor Hautayne drew forth — angelica. 

Most of them were too timid or irresolute to grasp any- 
thing. 

“ That ’s the analogy,” said Miss Pennington. “ One 
must take the risk of getting scorched. It is ‘ the woman 
who dares,’ after all.” 

It was great fun, though. 

Mother cut the cake. That was the last sport of the 
evening. 

If I should tell you who got the ring, you would think 
it really meant something. And the year is not out yet, 
you see. 

But there was no doubt of one thing, — that our Hal- 
loween at Westover was a famous little party. 

“ How do you all feel about it ? ” asked Barbara, sitting 
down on the hearth in the brown room, before the embers, 
and throwing the nuts she had picked up about the carpet 
into the coals. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


143 


We had carried the supper-dishes away into the out- 
room, and set them on a great spare table that we kept 
there. “ The room is as good as the girl,” said Barbara. 
It is a comfort to put by things, with a clear conscience, 
to a more rested time. We should let them be over the 
Sunday ; Monday morning would be all china and soap- 
suds ; then there would be a nice, freshly arrayed dresser, 
from top to bottom, and we should have had both a party 
and a piece of fall cleaning. 

“ How do you feel about it ? ” 

“ I feel as if we had, had a real own part}^, ourselves,” 
said Ruth ; “ not as if ‘ the girls ’ had come and had a 
party here. There was n’t anybody to show us how ! ” 

“ Except Miss Pennington. And was n’t it bewitchi- 
nating of her to come ? Nobody can say now — ” 

“ What do you say it for, tlien ? ” interrupted Rosa- 
mond. “ It was very nice of Miss Pennington, and kind, 
considering it was a young party. Otherwise, why should 
n’t she ? ” 


144 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


CHAPTER IX. 

WINTER NIGHTS AND WINTER DAYS. 



HAT was a nice party,” said 
* Miss Pennington, walking home 
with Leslie and Doctor John 
Hautayne, behind the Ingle- 
sides. “ What made it so 
nice ? ” 

“ You, very much,” said Les- 
lie, straightforwardly. 

“ I did n’t begin it,” said Miss 
Elizabeth. “No; that was n’t 
it. It was a step out, somehow. 
Out of the treadmill. I got 
tired of parties long ago, before 
I was old. They were all alike. 
The only difference was that in 
one house the staircase went up 
on the right side of the hall, 
and in another on the left, — 
now and then, perhaps, at the 
back ; and when you came down again, the lady near the 
drawing-room door might be Mrs. Hendee one night and 
Mrs. Marchbanks another ; but after that it was all the 
same. And 0, how I did get to hate ice-cream ! ” 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


145 


“ This was a party of ‘ nexts,’ ” said Leslie, ‘‘ instead 
of a selfsame.” 

“ What a good time Miss Waters had — quietly ! You 
could see it in her face. A pretty face ! ” Miss Elizabeth 
^ spoke in a lower tone, for Lucilla was just before the 
Inglesides, with Helen and Pen Pennington. “ She 
works too hard, though. I wish she came out more.” 

“ The ‘ nexts ’ have to get tired of books and mending- 
baskets, while the firsts are getting tired of ice-creams,” 
replied Leslie. “ Dear Miss Pennington, there are ever 
so many nexts, and people don’t think anything about 
it!” 

“ So there are,” said Miss Elizabeth, quietly. “ Peo- 
ple are very stupid. They don’t know what will freshen 
^ themselves up. They think the trouble is with the con- 
fectionery, and so they try macaroon and pistachio instead 
of lemon and vanilla. Fresh people are better than fresh 
flavors. But I think we had everything fresh to-night. 
What a beautiful old home-y house it is ! ” 

“ And what a home-y family I ” said Doctor John 
^ Hautayne. 

“ We have an old home-y house,” said Miss Penning- 
ton, suddenly, “ with landscape-papered walls and cosey, 
, deep windows and big chimneys. And we don’t half use 
it. Doctor Hautayne, I mean to have a party! Will 
you stay and come to it ? ” 

“ Any time within my two months’ leave,” replied 
Doctor Hautayne, “ and with very great pleasure.” 

“ So she will have it before very long,” said Leslie, 
telling us about the talk the next day. 

It ! Well, when Miss Pennington took up a thing she 
10 


146 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


did take it up! That does not come in here, though,— 
any more of it. 

The Penningtons are very proud people. They have 
not a very great deal of money, like the Haddens, and 
they are not foremost in everything like the March- 
bankses ; somehow they do not seem to care to take the 
trouble for that ; but they are so established ; it is a fam- 
ily like an old tree, that is past its green branching time, 
and makes little spread or summer show, but whose roots 
reach out away underneath, and grasp more ground than 
all the rest put together. 

They live in an old house that is just like them. It 
has not a new-fashioned thing about Jt. The walls are 
square, plain brick, painted gray ; and there is a low, 
broad porch in front, and then terraces, flagged with 
gray stone and bordered with flower-beds at each side 
and below. They have peacocks, and guinea-hens, and 
more roses and lilies and larkspurs and foxgloves and nar^ 
cissus than flowers of any newer sort ; and there are great 
bushes of box and southernwood, that smell sweet as you 

go by- 

Old General Pennington had been in the army all his 
life. He was a captain at Lundy’s Lane, and got a wound 
there which gave him a stiff elbow ever after ; and his 
oldest son was killed in Mexico, just after he had been 
brevetted Major. There is a Major Pennington now, — 
the younger brother, — out at Fort Vancouver ; and he 
is Pen’s father. When her mother died, away out there, 
he had to send her home. The Penningtons are just as 
proud as the stars and stripes themselves ; and their glory 
is off the selfsame piece. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


147 


They made very much of Dakie Thayne when he was 
here, in their quiet, retired way ; and they had always 
been polite and cordial to the Inglesides. 

One morning, a little while after our party, mother was 
making an apple-pudding for dinner, when Madam Pen- 
nington and Miss Elizabeth drove round to the door. 

Ruth was out at her lessons ; Barbara was busy help- 
ing Mrs. Holabird. Rosamond went to the door, and let 
them into the brown room. 

“ Mother will be sorry to keep you waiting, but she 
will come directly. She is just in the middle of an apple- 
pudding.” 

Rosamond said it with as much simple grace of pride as 
if she had had to say, “ Mother is busy at her modelling, 
and cannot leave her clay till she has damped and cov- 
ered it.” Her nice perception went to the very farther- 
most ; it discerned the real best to be made of things, the 
best that w^as ready made, and put that forth. 

“ And I know,” said Madam Pennington, “ that an 
apple-pudding must not be left in the middle. I wonder 
if she would let an old woman who has lived in barracks 
come to her where she is ? ” 

Rosamond’s tact was superlative. She did not say, “ I 
will go and see ” ; she got right up and said, “ I am sure 
she will ; please come this way,” and opened the door, 
with a sublime confidence, full and without warning, upon 
the scene of operations. 

“ O, how nice ! ” said Miss Elizabeth ; and Madam 
Pennington walked forward into the sunshine, holding her 
hand out to Mrs. Holabird, and smiling all the way from 
her smooth old forehead down to the “ seventh beauty ” 
of her dimple-cleft and placid chin. 


148 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Why, this is really coming to see people ! ” she said. 

Mrs. Holabird’s white hand did not even want dusting ; 
she just laid down the bright little chopper with which she 
was reducing her flour and butter to a golden powder, 
and took Madam Pennington’s nicely gloved Angers into 
her own, without a breath of apology. Apology ! It was 
very meek of her not to look at all set up. 

Barbara rose from her chair with a red ringlet of apple- 
paring hanging down against her white apron, and seated 
herself again at her work when the visitors had taken the 
two opposite corners of the deep, cushioned sofa. 

The red cloth was folded back across the end of the 
dining-table, and at the other end were mother’s white 
board and rolling-pin, the pudding-cloth wrung into a twist 
out of the scald, and waiting upon a plate, and a pitcher 
of cold water with ice tinkling against its sides. Mother 
sat with the deal bowl in her lap, turning and mincing 
with the few last strokes the light, delicate dust of the 
pastry. The sunshine — work and sunshine always go so 
blessedly together — poured in, and filled the room up 
with life and glory. 

“ Why, this is the pleasantest room in all your house ! 
said Miss Elizabeth. 

“ That is just what Ruth said it would be when we 
turned it into a kitchen,” said Barbara. 

“ You don’t mean that this is really your kitchen ! ” 

“ I don’t think we are quite sure what it is,” replied 
Barbara, laughing. “We either dine in our kitchen or 
kitch in our dining-room ; and I don’t believe we have 
found out yet which it is ! ” 

“ You are wonderful people ! ” 


WE GIELS: A HOME STORY. 


149 


“ You ought to have belonged to the army, and lived 
in quarters,” said Mrs. Pennington. “ Only you would 
have made your rooms so bewitching you would have been 
always getting turned out.” 

“ Turned out ? ” 

“ Yes ; by the ranking family. That is the way they 
do. The major turns out the captain, and the colonel the 
major. There ^s no rest for the sole of your foot till you ’re 
a general.” 

Mrs. Holabird set her bowl on the table, and poured in 
the ice-water. Then the golden dust, turned and cut 
lightly by the chopper, gathered into a tender, mellow 
mass, and she lifted it out upon the board. She shook 
out the scalded cloth, spread it upon the emptied bowl, 
sprinkled it -snowy-thick with flour, rolled out the crust 
with a free quick movement, and laid it on, into the curve 
of the basin. Barbara brought the apples, cut up in white 
fresh slices, and slid them into the round. Mrs. Holabird 
folded over the edges, gathered up the linen cloth in her 
hands, tied it tightly with a string, and Barbara disap- 
peared with it behind the damask screen, where a puff of 
steam went up in a minute that told the pudding was in. 
Then Mrs. Holabird went into the pantry-closet and 
washed her hands, that never really came to need more 
than a flnger-bowl could do for them, and Barbara carried 
after her the board and its etceteras, and the red cloth 
was drawn on again, and there was nothing but a low, 
comfortable bubble in the chimney-corner to tell of house- 
wifery or dinner. 

“ I wish it had lasted longer,” said Miss Elizabeth. “ I 
am afraid I shall feel like company again now.” 


150 


WE GIRLS : A HOME STORY. 


“ I am ashamed to tell you what I came for,” said Mad 
am Pennington. “It was to ask about a girl. Can I do 
anything with Winny Lafferty? ” 

“I wish you could,” said Mrs. Holabird, benevolently. 

“ She needs doing wnth ” said Barbara. 

“ Your having her would be different from our doing 
so,” said Mrs. Holabird. “ I often think that one of the 
tangles in the girl-question is the mistake of taking the 
rawest specimens into families that keep but one. With 
your Lucy, it might be the very making of Winny to go 
to you.” 

“ The ‘ next ’ for her, as Ruth would say,” said Barbara. 

“ Yes. The least little thing that comes next is better 
than a world full of wisdom away off beyond. There is 
too much in ‘ general housework ’ for one igiforant, inex- 
perienced brain to take in. “ What should we think of a 
government that gave out its ‘ general field-work ’ so ? ” 

“ There won’t be any Lucys long,” said Madam Pen- 
nington, with a sigh. “ What are homes coming to ? ” 

“ Back to homes^ I hope, from houses divided against 
themselves into parlors and kitchens,” said mother, earnest- 
ly. “ If I should tell you all I think about it, you would 
say it was visionary, I am afraid. But I believe we have 
got to go back to first principles ; and then the Lucys will 
grow again.” 

“ Modern establishments are not homes truly,” said 
Madam Pennington. 

“We shall call them by their names, as the French do, 
if we go on,” said mother, — “ hotels.” 

“ And how are we to stop, or help it ? The enemy has 
got possession. Irishocracy is a despotism in the land.” 


WE GIELS: A HOME STORY. 


151 


“ Only,” said mother, in her sweetest, most heartfelt 
way, “ by learning how true it is that one must be chief 
to really serve ; that it takes the highest to do perfect 
ministering ; that the brightest grace and the most beau- 
tiful culture must come to bear upon this little, every-day 
living, which is all that the world works for after all. The 
whole heaven is made that just the daily bread for human 
souls may come down out of it. Only the Lord God can 
pour this room full of little waves of sunshine, and make 
a still, sweet morning in the earth.” 

Mother and Madam Pennington looked at each other 
with soulful eyes. 

‘‘‘We girls,’” began mother again, smiling, — “for 
that is the way the children count me in, — said to each 
other, when we first tried this new plan, that we would 
make an art-kitchen. We meant we would have things 
nice and pretty for our common work ; but there is some- 
thing behind that, — the something that ‘ makes the 
meanest task divine,’ — the spiritual correspondence of it. 
When we are educated up to that I think life and society 
will be somewhat different. I think we shall not always 
stop short at the drawing-room, and pretend at each other 
on the surface of things. I think the time may come 
when young girls and single women will be as willing, 
and think it as honorable, to go into homes which they 
need, and which need them, and give the best that they 
have grown to into the commonwealth of them, as they 
are willing now to educate and try for public places. And 
it will seem to them as great and beautiful a thing to do. 
They won’t be buried, either. When they take the work 
up, and glorify it, it will glorify them. We don’t know 


152 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


yet what households might be, if now we have got the 
wheels so perfected, we would put the living spirit into 
the wheels. They are the motive power ; homes are the 
primary meetings. They would be little kingdoms, of 
great might ! I wish women would be content with their 
mainspring work, and not want to go out and point the 
time upon the dial ! ” 

Mother never would have made so long a speech, but 
that beautiful old Mrs. Pennington was answering her back 
all the time out of her eyes. There was such a magnet- 
ism between them for the moment, that she scarcely knew 
she was saying it all. The color came up in their cheeks, 
and they were young and splendid, both of them. We 
thought it was as good a Woman’s Convention as if there 
had been two thousand of them instead of two. And 
when some of the things out of the closets get up on the 
house-tops, maybe it will prove so. 

Madam Pennington leaned over and kissed mother 
when she took her hand at going away. And then Miss 
Elizabeth spoke out suddenly, — 

“ I have not done my errand yet, Mrs. Holabird. 
Mother has taken up all the time. I want to have some 
nexts. Your girls know what I mean ; and I want them 
to take hold and help. They are going to be ‘ next 
Thursdays,’ and to begin this very coming Thursday of 
all. I shall give primary invitations only, — and my 
primaries are to find secondaries. No household is to rep- 
resent merely itself ; one or two, or more, from one fam- 
ily are to bring always one or two, or more, from some- 
where else. I am going to try if one little bit of social 
life cannot be exogenous; and if it can, what the branch-, 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


153 


mg-out will come to. I think we want sapwood as well 
as heartwood to keep us green. If anybody does n’t 
quite understand, refer to ‘ How Plants Grow — Gray.’ ” 
She went off, leaving us that to think of. 

Two days after she looked in again, and said more. 

“ Besides that, every primary or season invitation im- 
poses a condition. Each member is to provide one prac- 
tical answer to ‘ What next ? ’ ‘ Next Thursday ’ is al- 

ways to be in charge of somebody. You may do what 
you like, or can, with it. I ’ll manage the first myself. 
After that I wash my hands.” 

Out of it grew fourteen incomparable Thursday even- 
ings. Pretty much all we can do about them is to tell 
that they were ; we should want fourteen new numbers 
to write their full history. It was like Mr. Hale’s lovely 
“ Ten Times One is Ten.” They all came from that 
one blessed little Halloween party of ours. It means 
something that there is such a thing as the multiplication- 
table ; does n’t it ? You can’t help yourself if you start 
a unit, good or bad. The Garden of Eden, and the Ark, 
and the Loaves and Fishes, and the Hundred and Forty- 
four Thousand sealed in their foreheads, tell of it, all 
through the Bible, from first to last. “ Multiply ! ” was 
the very next, inevitable commandment, after the “ Let 
there be, ! ” 

It was such a thing as had never rolled up, or branched 
out, though, in Westover before. The Marchbankses did 
not know what to make of it. People got in who had never 
belonged. There they were, though, in the stately old 
Pennington house, that was never thrown open for noth- 
ing ; and when they were once there you really coj^'Jd not 


154 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


tell the difference ; unless, indeed, it were that the old, 
naiddle wood was the deadest, just as it is in the trees *, 
and that the life was in the new sap and the green rind. 

Lucilla Waters invented charades ; and Helen Josselyn 
acted them, as charades had never been acted on West 
Hill until now. When it came to the Hobarts’ “ Next 
Thursday ” they gave us “ Dissolving Views,” — every 
successive queer fashion that had come up resplendent 
and gone down grotesque in these last thirty years. Mrs. 
Hobart had no end of old relics, — handbaskets packed 
full of venerable bonnets, that in their close gradation of 
change seemed like one individual Indur passing through 
a metempsychosis of millinery ; nests of old hats that were 
odder than the bonnets ; swallow-tailed coats ; broad- 
skirted blue ones with brass buttons ; baby waists and 
basquines ; leg-of-mutton sleeves, balloons, and military ; 
collars inch-wide and collars ell-wide with ruffles rayon- 
nantes ; gathers and gores, tunnel-skirts, and barrel-skirts 
and paniers. She made monstrous paper dickeys, and 
high black stocks, and great bundling neckcloths ; the 
very pocket-handkerchiefs were as ridiculous as anything, 
from the waiter-napkin size of good stout cambric to a 
quarter-dollar bit of a middle with a cataract of “ chan- 
delier ” lace about it. She could tell everybody how to do 
their hair, from “ flat curls ” and “ scallops ” down or up 
to frizzes and chignons; and after we had all filed in 
slowly, one by one, and filled up the room, I don’t think 
there ever could have been a funnier evenins; ! 

We had musical nights, and readings. We had a 
“ Mutual Friend ” Thursday ; that was Mrs. Ingleside’s. 
Rosamond was the Boofer Lady : Barbara was Lavvy the 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


155 



Irrepressible ; and Miss Pennington herself was Mrs. 
Wilfer ; Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were the Boffins ; and 
Doctor Ingleside, with a wooden leg strapped on, dropped 
into poetry in the light of a friend ; Maria Hendee came 
in twisting up her back hair, as Pleasant Biderhood, — 
Maria Hendee’s back hair was splendid; Leslie looked 
very sweet and quiet as Lizzie Hexam, and she brought 
with her for her secondary that night the very, real little 
doll’s dressmaker herself, — Maddy Freeman, who has 
carved brackets, and painted lovely book-racks and easels 
and vases and portfolios for almost everybody’s parlors, 
and yet never gets into them herself. 

Leslie would not have asked her to be Jennie Wren, 


156 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


because she really has a lame foot ; but when they told 
her about it, she said right off, “ O, how I wish I could 
be that ! ” She has not only the lame foot, but the won- 
derful “ golden bower ” of sunshiny hair too ; and she 
knows the doll’s dressmaker by heart ; she says she ex- 
pects to find her some time, if ever she goes to England 
— or to heaven. Truly she was up to the tricks and 
the manners ” of the occasion ; nobody entered into it 
with more self-abandonment than she ; she was so com- 
pletely Jennie Wren that no one — at ihe moment — 
thought of her in any other character, or remembered 
their rules of behaving according to the square of the dis- 
tance. She “ took patterns ” of Mrs. Lewis March- 
banks’s trimmings to her very face ; she reached up be- 
hind Mrs. Linceford, and measured the festoon of her 
panier. There was no reason why she should be afraid 
or abashed ; Maddy Freeman is a little lady, only she is 
poor, and a genius. She stepped right out of Dickens’s 
story, not into it, as the rest of us did ; neither did she 
even seem to step consciously into the grand Pennington 
house; all she did as to that was to go “up here,” or 
“ over there,” and “ be dead,” as fresh, new-world de- 
lights attracted her. Lizzie Hexam went too ; they be- 
longed together ; and T’other Governor would insist on 
following after them, and being comfortably dead also, 
though Society was behind him, and the Veneerings and 
the Podsnaps looking on. Mrs. Ingleside did not provide 
any Podsnaps or Veneerings ; she said they would be 
there. 

Now Eugene Wrayburn was Doctor John Hautayne; 
for this was only our fourth evening. Nobody had any- 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


157 


thing to say about parts, except the person whose “ next ’* 
it was ; people had simply to take what they were helped 
to. 

We began to be a little suspicious of Doctor Hautayne ; 
to wonder about his what next.” Leslie behaved as if 
she had always known him ; I believe it seemed to her as 
if she always had ; some lives meet in a way like that. 

It did not end with parties, Miss Pennington’s exoge- 
nous experiment. She did not mean it should. A great 
deal that was glad and comfortable came of it to many 
persons. Miss Elizabeth asked Maddy Freeman to “ come 
up and be dead ” whenever she felt like it ; she goes 
there every week now, to copy pictures, and get rare little 
bits for her designs out of the Penningtons’ great portfo- 
lios of engravings and drawings of ancient ornamenta- 
tions ; and half the time they keep her to luncheon or to 
tea. Lucilla Waters knows them now as well as we do ; 
and she is taking German lessons with Pen Pennington. 

It really seems as if the “ nexts ” would grow on so that 
at last it would only be our old “ set ” that would be in 
any danger of getting left out. “ Society is like a coral 
island after all,” says Leslie Goldthwaite. “ It is n’t a 
rock of the Old Silurian.” 

It was a memorable winter to us in many ways, — that 
last winter of the nineteenth century’s seventh decade. 

One day — everything has to be' one day, and all in a 
minute, when it does come, however many days lead up 
to it — Doctor Ingleside came in and told us the news. 
He had been up to see Grandfather Holabird ; grand- 
father was not quite well. 

They told him at home, the doctor said, not to stop any- 


158 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


where ; he knew what they meant by that, but he did n^t 
care ; it was as much his news as anybody’s, and why 
should he be kept down to pills and plasters ? 

Leslie was going to marry Doctor John Hautayne. 

Well ! It was splendid news, and we had somehow 
expected it. And yet — “ only think ! ” That was all 
we could say ; that is a true thing people do say to each 
other, in the face of a great, beautiful fact. Take it in ; 
shut your door upon it ; and — think ! It is something 
that belongs to heart and soul. 

We counted up; it was only seven weeks. 

“ As if that were the w^hole of it ! ” said Doctor Ingle- 
side. “ As if the Lord did n’t know ! As if they had n’t 
been living on, to just this meeting-place ! She knows 
his life, and the sort of it, though she has never been in 
it with him before ; that is, we ’ll concede that, for the 
sake of argument, though I ’m not so sure about it ; and 
he has come right here into hers. They are fair, open, 
pleasant ways, both of them ; and here, from the joining, 
they can both look back and take in, each the other’s; 
and beyond they just run into one, you see, as foreor- 
dained, and there ’s no other way for them to go.” 

Nobody knew it but ourselves that next night, — 
Thursday. Doctor Hautayne read beautiful things from 
the Brownings at Miss Pennington’s that evening; it 
was his turn to provide; but for us, — we looked into 
new depths in Leslie’s serene, clear, woman eyes, and we 
felt the intenser something in his face and voice, and the 
wonder was that everybody could not see how quite 
another thing than any merely written poetry was really 
“next” that night for Leslie and for John Hautayne. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


159 


That was in December ; it was the first of March when 
Grandfather Holabird died. 

At about Christmas-time mother had taken a bad cold. 
We could not let her get up in the mornings to help 
before breakfast ; the winter work was growing hard ; 
there were two or three fires to manage besides the fur- 
nace, which father attended to ; and although our “ chore- 
man ” came and split up kindlings and filled the 
wood-boxes, yet we were all pretty well tired out, some- 
times, just with keeping warm. We began to begin to 
say things to each other which nobody actually finished. 
“ If mother does n’t get better,” and “ If this cold weather 
keeps on,” and “ Are we going to co-operate ourselves to 
death, do you think ? ” from Barbara, at last. 

Nobody said, “We shall have to get a girl again.” 
Nobody wanted to do that ; and everybody had a secret 
feeling of Aunt Roderick, and her prophecy that we 
“ should n’t hold out long.” But we were crippled and 
reduced ; Ruth had as much as ever she could do, with 
the short days and her music. 

“ I begin to believe it was easy enough for Grant to 
say ‘all summer said Barbara; “but this is Valley 
Forge.” The kitchen fire would n’t burn, and the ther- 
mometer was down to 3° above. Mother was worrying 
up stairs, we knew, because we would not let her come 
down until it was warm and her coffee was ready. 

That very afternoon Stephen came in from school with 
a word for the hour. 

“ The Stilkings are going to move right off to New 
Jersey,” said he. “Jim Stilking told me so. The doc- 
tor says his father can’t stay here.” 


160 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Arctura Fish won’t go,” said Rosamond, instantly. 

“ Arctura Fish is as neat as a pin, and as smart as a 
steel trap,” said Barbara, regardless of elegance ; “ and 
— since nobody else will ever dare to give in — I believe 
Arctura Fish is the very next thing, now, for us ! ” 

“ It is n’t giving in ; it is going on,” said Mrs. Hola- 
bird. 

It certainly was not going back. 

“We have got through ploughing- time, and now 
comes seed-time, and then harvest,” said Barbara. “We 
shall raise, upon a bit of renovated earth, the first millen- 
nial specimen, — see if we don’t ! — of what was supposed 
to be an extinct flora, — the Domestica antediluviana,^l 

Arctura Fish came to us. 

If you once get a new dress, or a new dictionary, or 
a new convenience of any kind, did you never notice that 
you immediately have occasions which prove that you 
couldn’t have lived another minute without it? We 
could not have spared Arctura a single day, after that, 
all winter. Mother gave up, and was ill for a fortnight. 
Stephen twisted his foot skating, and was laid up with a 
sprained ankle. 

And then, in February, grandfather was taken with 
that last fatal attack, and some of us had to be with Aunt 
Roderick nearly all the time during the three weeks that 
he lived. 

When they came to look through the papers there was 
no will found, of any kind ; neither was that deed of gift. 

Aunt Trixie was the only one out of the family who 
knew anything about it. She had been the “family 
bosom,” Barbara said, ever since she cuddled us up in 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


161 


oat baby blankets, and told us “ this little pig, and that 
little pig/^ while she warmed our toes. 

“ Don’t tell me ! ” said Aunt Trixie. Aunt Trixie 
never liked the Roderick Holabirds. 

We tried not to think about it, but it was not comfort- 
able. It was, indeed, a very serious anxiety and trouble 
that began, in consequence, to force itself upon us. 

After the bright, gay nights had come weary, vexing 
days. And the worst was a vague shadow of family 
distrust and annoyance. Nobody thought any real harm, 
nobody disbelieved or suspected ; but there it was. We 
could not think how such a declared determination and 
act of Grandfather Holabird should have come to nothing. 
Uncle and Aunt Roderick “ could not see what we could 
expect about it ; there was nothing to show ; and there 
were John and John’s children ; it was not for any one 
or two to settle.” 

Only Ruth said “ we were all good people, and meant 
right ; it must all come right, somehow.” 

But father made up his mind that we could not afford 
to keep the place. He should pay his debts, now, the 
first thing. What was left must do for us; the house 
must go into the estate. 

It was fixed, though, that we should stay there for the 
summer, — until affairs were settled. 

“ It ’s a dumb shame ! ” said Aunt Trixie. 


162 


WE CxlRLS: A HOME STORY* 


CHAPTER X. 

RESPONSIBILITY. 


HE June days did not make 
it any better. And the June 
nights, — well, we had to sit in 
the “ front box at the sunset,” 
and think how there would be 
June after June here for some- 
body, and w’e should only have 
had just two of them out of our 
whole lives. 

Why did not grandfather give 
us that paper, when he began 
to ? And what could have be- 
come of it since ? And what if 
it were found some, time, after 
the dear old place was sold and 
gone? For it was the “dear 
old place ” already to us, though 
we had only lived there a year, 
and though Aunt Roderick did 
say, in her cold fashion, just as if we could choose about 
it, that “ it was not as if it were really an old homestead ; 
it would n’t be so much of a change for usj if we made 



WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


163 


up our minds not to take it in, as if we had always lived 
there.” 

Why, we had always lived there ! That was just the 
way we had always been trying to spell “ home,” though 
we had never got the right letters to do it with before. 
When exactly the right thing comes to you, it is a thing 
that has always been. You don’t get the very sticks and 
stones to begin with, maybe ; but what they stand for 
grows up in you, and when you come to it you know it is 
yours. The best things — the most glorious and won- 
derful of all — will be what we shall see to have been 
“laid up for us from the foundation.” Aunt Roderick 
did not see one bit of how that was with us. 

“ There is n’t a word in the tenth commandment about 
not coveting your own house,” Barbara would say, boldly. 
And we did covet, and we did grieve. And although we 
did not mean to have “ hard thoughts,” we felt that Aunt 
Roderick was hard ; and that Uncle Roderick and Uncle 
John were hatefully matter-of-fact and of-course about 
the “ business.” And that paper might be somewhere, 
yet. We did not believe that Grandfather Holabird had 
“ changed his mind and burned it up.” He had not had 
much mind to change, within those last six months. 
When he was well, and had a mind, we knew what he 
had meant to do. 

If Uncle Roderick and Uncle John had not believed 
a word of what father told them, they could not have 
.behaved very differently. We half thought, sometimes, 
that they did not believe it. And very likely they half 
thought that we w^ere making it appear that they had 
done something that was not right. And it is the half 


164 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


thoughts that are the hard thoughts. “ It is very dis- 
agreeable,” Aunt Roderick used to say. 

Miss Trixie Spring came over and spent days with us, 
as of old ; and when the house looked sweet and pleasant 
with the shaded summer light, and was full of the gracious 
summer freshness, she would look round and shake her 
head, and say, It ’s just as beautiful as it can be. And 
it ’s a dumb shame. Don’t tell me ! ” 

Uncle Roderick was going to “ take in ’’ the old home- 
stead with his share, and that was as much as he cared 
about; Uncle John was used to nothing but stocks and 
railway shares, and did not want “ encumbrances ” ; and 
as to keeping it as estate property and paying rent to the 
heirs, ourselves included, — nobody wanted that; they 
would rather have things settled up. There would always 
be questions of estimates and repairs ; it was not best to 
have things so in a family. Separate accounts as well as 
short ones, made best friends. We knew they all thought 
father was unlucky to have to do with in such matters. 
He would still be the “ limited ” man of the family. It 
would take two thirds of his inheritance to pay off those 
old ’57 debts. 

So we took our lovely Westover summer days as things 
we could not have any more of. And when you begin 
to feel that about anything, it would be a relief to have 
had the last of it. Nothing lasts always ; but we like to 
have the forever-and-ever feeling, however delusive. A 
child hates his Sunday clothes, because he knows he can- 
not put them on again on Monday. 

With all our troubles, there was one pleasure in the 
house, — Arctura. We had made an art-kitchen ; now 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


165 


we were making a little poem of a serving-maiden. We 
did not turn things over to her, and so leave chaos to come 
again ; we only let her help ; we let her come in and learn 
with us the nice and pleasant ways that we had learned. 
We did not move the kitchen down stairs again ; we were 
determined not to have a kitchen any more. 

Arctura was strong and blithe ; she could fetch and 
carry, make fires, wash dishes, clean knives and brasses, 
do all that came hardest to us ; and could do, in other 
things, with and for us, what she saw us do. We all 
worked together till the work was done ; then Arctura sat 
down in the afternoons, just as we did, and read books, 
or made her clothes. She always looked nice and pretty. 
She had large dark calico aprons for her work ; and little 
white bib-aprons for table-tending and dress-up ; and 
mother made for her, on the machine, little linen collars 
and cuffs. 

We had a pride in her looks ; and she knew it ; she 
learned to work as delicately as we did. When break- 
fast or dinner was ready, she was as fit to turn round and 
serve as we were to sit down ; she was astonished her- 
self, at ways and results that she fell in with and attained. 

“ Why, where does the dirt go to ? ” she would ex- 
claim. “ It never gethers anywheres.’’ 

“ Gathers, — anywhere^'' Rosamond corrected. 

Arctura learned little grammar lessons, and other such 
things, by the way. She was only “ next ” below us in our 
family life ; there was no great gulf fixed. We felt that 
we had at least got hold of the right end of one thread in 
the social tangle. This, at any rate, had come out of our 
year at Westover. 


166 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ Things seem so easy,” the girl would say. “ It is 
just like two times one.” 

So it was ; because we did not jumble in all the Anal- 
ysis and Compound Proportion of housekeeping right on 
top of the multiplication-table. She would get on by de- 
grees ; by and by she would be in evolution and geomet- 
rical progression without knowing how she got there. If 
you want a house, you must build it up, stone by stone, 
and stroke by stroke ; if you want a servant, you, or 
somebody for you, must huild one, just the same ; they do 
not spring up and grow, neither can be “ knocked togeth- 
er.” And I tell you, busy, eager women of this day, 
wanting great work out of doors, this is just what “ we 
girls,” some of us, — and some of the best of us, perhaps, — 
have got to stay at home awhile and do. 

“ It is one of the little jobs that has been waiting for a 
good while to be done,” says Barbara ; “ and Miss Pen- 
nington has found out another. ‘ There may be,’ she 
says, ‘ need of women for reorganizing town-meetings ; 
I won’t undertake to say there is n’t ; but I ’m sure 
there ’s need of them for reorganizing parlor meetings. 
They are getting to be left altogether to the little school- 
girl “ sets.” Women who have grown older, and can see 
through all that nonsense, and have the position and 
power to break it up, ought to take hold. Don’t you 
think so ? Don’t you think it is the duty of women of 
my age and class to see to this thing before it grows any 
worse ? ’ And I told her, — right up, respectful, — 
Yes ’m ; it wum ! Think of her asking me, though ! ” 

Just as things were getting to be so ditferent and so 
nice on West Hill, it seemed so hard to leave it I Every- 
thing reminded us of that. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


167 


A beautiful plan came up for Ruth, though, at this 
time. What with the family worries, — which Ruth al- 
ways had a way of gathering to herself, and hugging up, 
prickers in, as if so she could keep the nettles from other 
people’s fingers, — and her hard work at her music, she 
was getting thin. We were all insisting that she must 
take a vacation this summer, both from teaching and 
learning ; when, all at once. Miss Pennington made up 
her mind to go to West Point and Lake George, and to 
take Penelope with her ; and she came over and asked 
Ruth to go too. 

“ If you don’t mind a room alone, dear ; I ’m an awful 
coward to have come of a martial family, and I must have 
Pen with me nights. I ’m nervous about cars, too ; I 
want two of you to keep up a chatter ; I should be mis- 
erable company for one, always distracted after the whis- 
tles.” 

Ruth’s eyes shone ; but she colored up, and her thanks 
had half a doubt in them. She would tell Auntie .• and 
they would think how it could be. 

“ Wliat a nice way for you to go ! ” said Barbara, after 
Miss Pennington left. “ And how nice it will be for you 
to see Dakie ! ” At which Ruth colored up again, and 
only said that “ it would certainly be the nicest possible 
way to go, if she were to go at all.” 

Barbara meant — or meant to be understood that she 
meant — that Miss Pennington knew everybody, and be- 
longed among the general officers ; Ruth had an instinct 
that it would only be possible for her to go by an invita- 
tion like this from people out of her own family. 

“ But does n’t it seem queer she should choose me, out 


168 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


of US all ? she asked. “ Does n’t it seem selfish for me 
lo be the one to go ? ” 

“Seem selfish? Whom to?” said Barbara, bluntly. 
“We were n’t asked.” 

“ I wish — everybody — knew that,” said Ruth. 

Making this little transparent speech, Ruth blushed 
once more. But she went, after all. She said we pushed 
her out of the nest. She went out into the wide, won- 
derful world, for the very first time in her life. 

This is one of her letters ; — 

Dear Mother and Girls: — It is perfectly lovely 
here. I wish you could sit where I do this morning, look- 
ing up the still river in the bright light, with the tender pur- 
ple haze on the far-off hills, and long, low, shady Constitu- 
tion Island lying so beautiful upon the water on one side, 
and dark shaggy Cro’ Nest looming up on the other. The 
Parrott guns at the foundry, over on the headland oppo- 
site, are trying, — as they are trying almost all the time, — 
against the face of the high, old, desolate cliff ; and the 
hurtling buzz of the shells keeps a sort of slow, tremen- 
dous time-beat on the air. 

I think I am almost more interested in Constitution Isl- 
and than in any other part of the place. I never knew 
until I came here that it was the home of the Misses War- 
ner; the place where Queechy came from, and Dollars 
and Cents, and the Wide, Wide World. It seems so 
strange to think that they sit there and write still, lovely 
stories while all this parade and bustle and learning how to 
fight are going on close beside and about them. 

The Cadets are very funny. They will do almost any 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


169 


tiling for mischief, — the frolic of it, I mean. Dakie 
Thayne tells us very amusing stories. They are just go- 
ing into camp now ; and they have parades and battery- 
practice every day. They have target-firing at old Cro’ 
Nest, — which has to stand all the firing from the north 
battery, just around here from the hotel. One day the 
cadet in charge made a very careful sighting of his piece ; 
made the men train the gun up and down, this way and 
that, a hair more or a hair less, till they were nearly out 
of patience ; when, lo ! just as he had got “ a beautiful 
bead,” round came a superintending officer, and took a 
look too. The bad boy had drawn it full on a poor old 
black cow ! I do not believe he would have really let her 
be blown up; but Dakie says, — “Well, he rather 
thinks, — if she would have stood still long enough, — he 
would have let her be — astonished I ” 

The walk through the woods, around the cliff, over the 
river, is beautiful. If only they would n’t call it by such 
a silly name ! 

We went out to Old Fort Putnam yesterday. I did not 
know how afraid Miss Pennington could be of a little 
thing before. I don’t know, now, how much of it was 
fun ; for, as Dakie Thayne said, it was agonizingly funny. 
What must have happened to him after we got back 
and he left us I cannot imagine ; he did n’t laugh much 
there, and it must have been a misery of politeness. 

We had been down into the old, ruinous enclosure ; 
had peeped in at the dark, choked-up casemates ; and had 
gone round and come up on the edge of the broken em- 
bankment, which we were following along to where it 
sloped down safely again, — when, just at the very mid- 


170 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


die and highest and most impossible point, down sat Miss 
Elizabeth among the stones, and declared she could nei- 
ther go back nor forward. She had been frightened to death 
all the way, and now her head was quite gone. “ No ; 
nothing should persuade her ; she never could get up on 
her feet again in that dreadful place.” She laughed in 
the midst of it ; but she was really frightened, and there 
she sat ; Dakie went to her, and tried to help her up, and 
lead her on ; but she would not be helped. “ What 
would come of it ? ” “ She did n’t know ; she supposed 

that was the end of her ; she could n’t do anything.” 
“ But, dear Miss Pennington,” says Dakie, “ ar6 you go- 
ing to break short off with life, right here, and make a 
Lady Simon Stylites of yourself? ” “ For all she knew ; 

she never could get down.” I think we must have been 
there, waiting and coaxing, nearly half an hour, before she 
began to hitch along ; for walk she would n’t, and she did 
n’t. She had on a black Ernani dress, and a nice silk 
underskirt; and as she lifted herself along with her hands, 
hoist after hoist sidewise, of course the thin stuff dragged on 
the rocks and began to go to pieces. By the time she came 
to where she could stand, she was a rebus of the Coliseum, 
— “a noble wreck in ruinous perfection.” She just had 
to tear off the long tatters, and roll them up in a bunch, 
and fling them over into a hollow, and throw the two 
or three breadths that were left over her arm, and walk 
home in her silk petticoat, itself much the sufferer from 
dust and fray, though we did all w^e could for her with 
pocket-handkerchiefs. 

“ What has happened to Miss Pennington ? ” said Mrs. 
General M , as. we came up on the piazza. 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


171 


“ Nothing,” said Dakie, quite composed and proper, 
“ only she got tired and sat down ; and it was dusty, — 
that was all.” He bowed and went off, without so much 
as a glance of secret understanding. 

“ A joke has as many lives as a cat, here,” he told Pen 
and me, afterwards, “ and that was too good not to keep 
to ourselves.” 

Dear little mother and girls, — I have told stories and 
described describes, and all to crowd out and leave to the 
last corner such a thing that Dakie Thayne wants to do ! 
We got to talking about Westover and last summer, and 
the pleasant old place, and all ; and I could n’t help telling 
him something about the worry. I know I had no busi- 
ness to ; and I am afraid I have made a snarl. He says 
he would like to buy the place I And he wanted to know 
if Uncle Stephen would n’t rent it of him if he did ! Just 
think of it, — that boy ! I believe he really means to 
write to Chicago, to his guardian. Of course it never came 
into my head when I told him ; it would n’t at any rate, 
and I never think of his having such a quantity of money. 
He seems just like — as far as that goes — any other boy. 
What shall I do ? Do you believe he will ? 

P. S. Saturday morning. I feel better about that Poll 
Parroting of mine, to-day. I have had another talk with 
Dakie. I don’t believe he will write ; now, at any rate. 
O girls ! this is just the most perfect morning ! 

Tell Stephen I ’ve got a splendid little idea, on purpose 
for him and me. Something I can hardly keep to 
myself till I get home. Dakie Thayne put it into my 
head. He is just the brightest boy, about everything ! I 


172 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


begin to feel in a hurry almost, to come back. I don’t 
think Miss Pennington will go to Lake George, after all. 
She says she hates to leave the Point, so many of her old 
friends are here. But Pen and I think she is afraid of 
the steamers. 

Ruth got home a week after this ; a little fatter, a little 
browner, and a little merrier and more talkative than she 
had ever been before. 

Stephen was in a great hurry about the splendid little 
mysterious idea, of course. Boys never can wait, half so 
well as girls, for anything. 

We were all out on the balcony that night before dusk, 
as usual. Ruth got up suddenly, and went into the house 
for something. Stephen went straight in after her. What 
happened upon that, the rest of us did not know till after* 
ward. But it is a nice little part of the story, — just be- 
cause there is so precious little of it. 

Ruth went round, through the brown room and the 
hall, to the front door. Stephen found her stooping down, 
with her face close to the piazza cracks. 

“ Hollo ! what ’s the matter ? Lost something ? ” 

Ruth lifted up her head. “ Hush ! ” 

“ Why, how your face shines ! What is up ? ” 

“ It ’s the sunset. I mean — that shines. Don’t say 
anything. Our splendid — little — idea, you know. It ’s 
under here.” 

“ Be dar — never-minded, if mine is ! ” 

“ You don’t know. Columbus did n’t know where his 
idea was — exactly. Do you remember when Sphinx hid 
her kittens under here last summer ? Brought ’ em round, 


WE GIKLS: A HOME STORY. 173 

over the wood-pile in the shed, and they never knew their 
way out till she showed ’ em ? ” 

It is rCt about kittens ! ” 

Has n’t Old Ma’amselle got some now ? 

“ Yes ; four.” 

“Could n’t you bring up one — or two — to-morrow 
morning early^ and make a place and tuck ’em in here, 
under the step, and put back the sod, and fasten ’em up ? ” 

“ What — for ? ” with wild amazement. 

“ I can’t do what I want to, just for an idea. It will 
make a noise, and I don’t feel sure enough. There had 
better be a kitten. I ’ll tell you the rest to-morrow morn- 
ing.” And Ruth was up on her two little feet, and had 
given Stephen a kiss, and was back into the house, and 
round again to the balcony, before he could say another 
word. 

Boys like a plan, though ; especially a mysterious getting- 
up-early plan ; and if it has cats in it, it is always funny. 
He made up his mind to be on hand. 

Ruth was first, though. She kept her little bolt drawn 
all night, between her room and that of Barbara and Rose. 
At five o’clock, she went softly across the passage to Ste- 
phen’s room, in her little wrapper and knit slippers. “ I 
shall be ready in ten minutes,” she whispered, right into 
his ear, and into his dream. 

“ Scat ! ” cried Stephen, starting up bewildered. 

And Ruth “scatted.” 

Down on the front piazza, twenty minutes after, she 
superintended the tucking in of the kittens, and then told 
him to bring a mallet and wedge. She had been very 
particular to have the kittens put under at a precise place, 


174 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


though there was a ready-made hole farther on. The cat 
babies mewed and sprawled and dragged themselves at 
feeble length on their miserable little legs, as small blind 
kittie winks are given to doing. 

“ They won’t go far,” said Ruth. “ Now, let ’s take 
this board up.” 

“ What — for f ” cried Stephen, again. 

“ To get them out, of course,” says Ruth. 

“ Well, if girls ain’t queer ! Queerer than cats ! ” 

“ Hush ! ” said Ruth, softly. “ I believe — but I don’t 
dare say a word yet — there ’s something there ! ” 

“ Of course there is. Two little yowling — ” 

“ Something we all want found, Steve,” Ruth whis- 
pered, earnestly. “But I don’t know. Do hush ! 
Make haste ! ” 

Stephen put down his face to the crack, and took a 
peep. Rather a long serious peep. When he took his 
face back again, “ I see something,” he said. “ It ’s white 
paper. Kind of white, that is. Do you suppose, Ruth — ? 
My cracky ! if you do ! ” 

“ We won’t suppose,” said Ruth. “ We ’ll hammer.” 

Stephen knocked up the end of the board with the mal- 
let, and then he got the wedge under and pried. Ruth 
pulled. Stephen kept hammering and prying, and Ruth 
held on to all he gained, until they slipped the -wedge 
along gradually, to where the board was nailed again, to 
the middle joist or stringer. Then a few more vigorous 
strokes, and a little smart levering, and the nails loosened, 
and one good wrench lifted it from the inside timber and 
they slid it out from under the house-boarding. 

Underneath lay a long, folded paper, much covered 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


175 


with drifts of dust, and speckled somewhat with damp. 
But it was a dry, sandy place, and weather had not badly 
injured it. 

“ Stephen, I am sure ! ” said Ruth, holding Stephen 
back by the arm. “ Don’t touch it, though ! Let it be, 
right there. Look at that corner, that lies opened up a 
little. Is n’t that grandfather’s writing? ” 



It lay deep down, and not directly under. They could 
scarcely have reached it with their hands. Stephen ran 
into the parlor, and brought out an opera-glass that was 
upon the table there. 


176 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ That ’s bright of you, Steve I cried Ruth. 

Through the glass they discerned clearly the handwrit^ 
ing. They read the words, at the upturned corner, — • 
“ heirs after him.” 

“ Lay the board back in its place,” said Ruth. “ It 
is n’t for us to meddle with any more. Take the kittens 
away.” Ruth had turned quite pale. 

Going down to the barn with Stephen, presently, carry- 
ing the two kittens in her arms, while he had the mallet 
and wedge, — 

“ Stephen,” said she, “ I ’m going to do something on 
my own responsibility.” 

“ I should think you had.” 

“ O, that was nothing. I had to do that. I had to 
make sure before I said anything. But now, — I ’m go- 
ing to ask Uncle and Aunt Roderick to come over. They 
ought to be here, you know.” 

“ Why ! don’t you suppose they will believe, mw f ” 

“ Stephen Holabird ! you ’re a bad boy ! No ; of course 
it is n’t Ruth kept right on from the barn, across 

the field, into the “ old place.” 

Mrs. Roderick Holabird was out in the east piazza, 
watering her house plants, that stood in a row against the 
wall. Her cats always had their milk, and her plants 
their water, before she had her own breakfast. It was a 
good thing about Mrs. Roderick Holabird, and it was a 
good time to take her. 

“ Aunt Roderick,” said Ruth, coming up, “ I want you 
and Uncle to come over right after breakfast ; or before, 
if you like ; if you please.” 

It was rather sudden, but for the repeated “ ifs.” 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 177 

“ You want ! ” said Mrs. Roderick in surprise. “ Who 
sent you ? ” 

“ Nobody. Nobody knows but Stephen and me. Some- 
thing is going to happen.” Ruth smiled, as one who has 
a pleasant astonishment in store. She smiled right up out 
of her heart-faith in Aunt Roderick and everybody. 

“ On the whole, I guess you ’d better come right off, — 
to breakfast ! ” How boldly little Ruth took the respon- 
sibility ! Mr. and Mrs. Roderick had not been over to 
our house for at least two months. It had seemed to 
happen so. Father always went there to attend to the 
“ business.” The “ papers ” were all at grandfather’s. 
All but this one, that the “ gale ” had taken care of. 

Uncle Roderick, hearing the voices, came out into the 
piazza. 

“We want you over at our house,” repeated Ruth. 
“Right off, now; there ’s something you ought to see 
about.” 

“ I don’t like mysteries,” said Mrs. Roderick, severely, 
covering her curiosity; “especially when children get 
them up. And it ’s no matter about the breakfast, either 
way. We can walk across, I suppose, Mr. Holabird, and 
see what it is all about. Kittens, I dare say.” 

“Yes,” said Ruth, laughing out ; “it is kittens, partly. 
Or was.” 

So we saw them, from mother’s room window, all com- 
ing along down the side-hill path together. 

We always went out at the front door to look at the 
morning. Arctura had set the table, and baked the bis- 
cuits ; we could breathe a little first breath of life, nowa- 
days, that did not come cut of the oven. 

12 


178 


WE GIRLS : A HOME STORY. 


Father was in the door-way. Stephen stood, as if he 
had been put there, over the loose board, that we did 
not know was loose. 

Ruth brought Uncle and Aunt Roderick up the long 
steps, and so around. 

“ Good morning,” said father, surprised. “ Why, Ruth, 
what is it ? ” And he met them right on that very loose 
board ; and Stephen stood stock still, pertinaciously in the 
way, so that they dodged and blundered about him. 

“ Yes, Ruth ; what is it ? ” said Mrs. Roderick Hola- 
bird. 

Then Ruth, after she had got the family solemnly 
together, began to be struck with the solemnity. Her 
voice trembled. 

“ I did n’t mean to make a fuss about it ; only I knew 
you would all care, and I wanted — Stephen and I have 
found something, mother ! ” She turned to Mrs. Stephen 
Holabird, and took her hand, and held it hard. 

Stephen stooped down, and drew out the loose board. 
“ Under there,” said he ; and pointed in. 

They could all see the folded paper, with the drifts of 
dust upon it, just as it had lain for almost a year. 

“ It has been there ever since the day of the September 
Gale, father,” he said. ‘‘ The day, you know, that grand- 
father was here.” 

“ Don’t you remember the wind and the papers ? ” said 
Ruth. “It was remembering that, that put it into our 
heads. I never thought of the cracks and — ” with a 
little, low, excited laugh — “ the ‘ total depravity of in- 
animate things,’ till — just a little while ago.” 

She did not say a word about that bright boy at West 
Point, now, before them all. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


179 


Uncle Roderick reached in with the crook of his cane, 
and drew forward the packet, and stooped down and lifted 
it up. He shook off the dust and opened it. He glanced 
along the lines, and at the signature. Not a single wit- 
nessing name. No matter. Uncle Roderick is an honest 
man. He turned round and held it out to father. 

“It is your deed of gift,’’ said he ; and then they two 
shook hands. 

“ There ! ” said Ruth, tremulous with gladness. “ I 
knew they would. That was it. That was why. I told 
you, Stephen ! ” ' 

“ No, you did n’t,” said Stephen. “ You never told 
me anything — but cats.” 

“ Well ! I ’m sure I am glad it is all settled,” said Mrs. 
Roderick Holabird, after a pause ; “ and nobody has any 
hard thoughts to lay up.” 

They would not stop to breakfast ; they said they would 
come another time. 

But Aunt Roderick, just before she went away, turned 
round and kissed Ruth. She is a supervising, regulating 
kind of a woman, and very strict about — well, other 
people’s — expenditures ; but she was glad that the “ hard 
thoughts ” were lifted off from her. 

“ I knew,” said Ruth, again, “ that we were all good 
people, and that it must come right.” 

“ Don’t tell we ” says Miss Trixie, intolerantly. “ She 
could n’t help herself.” 


180 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


CHAPTER XI. 

Barbara’s buzz. 

ESLIE GOLDTHWAITE’S 
world of friendship is not a 
circle. Or if it is, it is the far- 
off, immeasurable horizon that 
holds all of life and possibility. 

“ You must draw the line 
somewhere,” people say. “ You 
cannot be acquainted with 
everybody.” 

But Leslie’s lines are only 
radii. They reach out to 
wherever there is a sympathy ; 
they hold fast wherever they 
have once been joined. Conse- 
quently, she moves to laws that 
seem erratic to those for whom 
a pair of compasses can lay down 
the limit. Consequently, her 
wedding was “odd.” 

If Olivia Marchbanks had been going to be married 
there would have been a “ circle ” invited. Nobody 
would have been left out ; nobody would have been let 
in. She had lived in this necromantic ring ; she would 



WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


181 


be married in it ; she would die and be buried in it ; and 
of all the wide, rich, beautiful champaign of life beyond, — 
of all its noble heights, and hidden, tender hollows, — 
its gracious harvest fields, and its deep, grand, forest 
glooms, — she would be content, elegantly and exclu- 
sively, to know nothing. To her wedding people might 
come, indeed, from a distance, — geographically ; but 
they would come out of a precisely corresponding little 
sphere in some other place, and fit right into this one, for 
the time being, with the most edifying sameness. 

From the east and the west, the north and the south, 
they began to come, days beforehand, — the people who 
could not let Leslie Goldthwaite be married without being 
there. There were no proclamation cards issued, bearing 
in imposing characters the announcement of “ Their 
Daughter’s Marriage,” by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Gold- 
thwaite, after the like of which one almost looks to see, 
and somewhat feels the need of, the regular final invoca- 
tion, — “ God save the Commonwealth ! ” 

There had been loving letters sent here and there ; old 
Miss Craydocke, up in the mountains, got one, and came 
down a month earlier in consequence, and by the way of 
Boston. She stayed there at Mrs. Frank Scherman’s; 
and Frank and his wife and little Sinsie, the baby, — 
“ she is n’t Original Sin, as I was,” says her mother, — 

came up to Z together, and stopped at the hotel. 

Martha Josselyn came from New York, and stayed, of 
course, with the Inglesides. 

Martha is a horrible thing, girls ; how do you suppose 
I dare to put her in here as I do? She is a milliner. 
And this is how it happens. Her father is a compara- 


182 


WE GIELS: A HOME STORY. 


tively poor man, — a book-keeper with a salary. There 
are ever so many little Josselyns ; and Martha has always 
felt bound to help. She is not very likely to marry, and 
she is not one to take it into her calculation, if she were ; 
but she is of the sort who are said to be “ cut out for old 
maids,” and she knows it. She could not teach music, 
nor keep a school , her own schooling — not her educa- 
tion ; God never lets that be cut short — was abridged 
by the need of her at home. But she could do anything 
in the world with scissors and needle ; and she can make 
just the loveliest bonnets that ever were put together. 

So, as she can help more by making two bonnets in a 
day, and getting six dollars for them beside the materials, 
she lets her step-mother put out her impossible sewing, 
and has turned a little second-story room in her father’s 
house into a private millinery establishment. She will 
only take the three dollars apiece, beyond the actual cost, 
for her bonnets, although she might make a fortune if 
she would be rapacious ; for she says that pays her fairly 
for her time, and she has made up her mind to get 
through the world fairly, if there is any breathing-space 
left for fairness in it. If not, she can stop breathing, and 
go where there is. 

She gets as much to do as she can take. “ Miss Josse- 
lyn ” is one of the little unadvertised resources of New 
York, which it is very knowing, and rather elegant, to 
know about. But it would not be at all elegant to have 
her at a party. Hence, Mrs. Van Alstyne, who had a 
little bonnet, bkck lace and nasturtiums, at this very 
time, that Martha Josselyn had made for her, was aston- 
ished to find that she was Mrs. Ingleside’s sister and had 
come on to the marriage. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


183 


General and Mrs. Ingleside — Leslie’s cousin Delight — 
had come from their away-off, beautiful Wisconsin home, 
and brought little three-year-old Rob and Rob’s nurse 
with them. Sam Goldthwaite was at home from Phila- 
delphia, where he is just finishing his medical course, — 
and Harry was just back again from the Mediterranean ; 
SO’ that Mrs. Goldthwaite’s house was full too. Jack 
could not be here; they all grieved over that. Jack is 
out in Japan. But there came a wonderful “solid silk” 
dress, and a lovely inlaid cabinet, for Leslie’s wedding 
present, — the first present that arrived from anybody ; 
sent the day he got the news ; — and Leslie cried over 
them, and kissed them, and put the beautiful silk away, 
to be made up in the fashion next year, when Jack comes 
home ; and set his picture on the cabinet, and put his 
letters into it, and says she does not know what other 
things she shall find quite dear enough to keep them 
company. 

Last of all, the very day before the wedding, came old 
Mr. Marmaduke Wharne. And of all things in the 
world, he brought her a telescope. “ To look out at 
creation with, and keep her soul wide,” he says, and “to 
put her in mind of that night when he first found her out, 
among the Hivites and the Hittites and the Amalekites, 
up in Jefferson, and took her away among the planets, 
out of the snarl.” 

Miss Graydocke has been all summer making a fernery 
for Leslie ; and she took two tickets in the cars, and 
brought it down beside her, on the seat, all the way from 
Plymouth, and so out here. How they could get it to 
wherever they are going we all wondered, but Dr. 


184 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Haiitayne said it should go ; he would have it most curi- 
ously packed, in a box on rollers, and marked, — “ Dr. 
J. Hautayne, U. S. Army. Valuable scientific prepara- 
tions ; by no means to be turned or shaken.’^ But he 
did say, with a gentle prudence, — “ If somebody should 
give you an observatory, or a greenhouse, I think we 
might have to stop at that^ dear.’’ 

Nobody did, however. There was only one more big 
present, and that did not come. Dakie Thayne knew 
better. He gave her a magnificent copy of the Sistine 
Madonna, which his father had bought in Italy, and he 
wrote her that it was to be boxed and sent after her to her 
home. Se did not say that it was magnificent ; Leslie 
wrote that to us afterward, herself. She said it made it 
seem as if one side of her little home had been broken 
through and let in heaven. 

We were all sorry that Dakie could not be here. They 
waited till September for Harry ; “ but who,” wrote Da- 
kie, “ could expect a military engagement to wait till all 
the stragglers could come up ? I have given my consent 
and my blessing ; all I ask is that you will stop at West 
Point on your way.” And that was what they were 
going to do. 

Arabel Waite and Delia made all the wedding dresses. 
But Mrs. Goldthwaite had her own carefully perfected 
patterns, adjusted to a line in every part. Arabel meekly 
followed these, and saved her whole, fresh soul to pour 
out upon the flutings and finishing. 

It was a morning wedding, and a pearl of days. The 
summer had not gone from a single leaf. Only the parch 
and the blaze were over, and beautiful dews had cooled 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


185 


away their fever. The day-lilies were white among their 
broad, tender green leaves, and the tube-roses had come 
in blossom. There were beds of red and white carnations, 
heavy with perfume. The wide garden porch, into which 
double doors opened from the summer-room where they 
were married, showed these, among the grass-walks of the 
shady, secluded place, through its own splendid vista of 
trumpet-hung bignonia vines. 

Everybody wanted to help at this wedding who could 
help. Arabel Waite asked to be allowed to pour out cof- 
fee, or something. So in a black silk gown, and a new 
white cap, she took charge of the little room up stairs, 
where were coffee and cakes and sandwiches for the 
friends who came from a distance by the train, and might 
be glad of something to eat at twelve o’clock. Delia of- 
fered, “ if she only might,” to assist in the dining-room, 
where the real wedding collation stood ready. And even 
our Arctura came and asked if she might be “ lent,” to 
“ open doors, or anything.” The regular maids of the 
house found labor so divided that it was a festival day all 
through. 

Arctura looked as pretty a little waiting-damsel as 
might be seen, in her brown, two-skirted, best delaine 
dress, and her white, ruffled, muslin bib-apron, her nicely 
arranged hair, braided up high around her head and frizzed 
a little, gently, at the front, — since why should n’t she, 
too, have a bit of the fashion ? — and tied round with a 
soft, simple white ribbon. Delia had on a violet-and- 
white striped pique, quite new, with a ruffled apron also ; 
and her ribbon was white, too, and she had a bunch of 
violets and green leaves upon her bosom. We cared as 


186 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


much about their dress as they did about ours. Barbara 
herself had pinched Arctura’s crimps, and tied the little 
white bow among them. 

Every room in the house was attended. 

“ There never was such pretty serving,” said Mrs. 
Van Alstyne, afterward. “ Where did they get such peo^ 
pie ? — And beautiful serving,” she went on, reverting 
to her favorite axiom, “ is, after all, the very soul of liv- 
ing!” 

“ Yes, ma’am,” said Barbara, gravely. “ I think we 
shall find that true always.” 

Opposite the door into the garden porch were corre^ 
spending ones into the hall, and directly down to these 
reached the last flight of the staircase, that skirted the 
walls at the back with its steps and landings. We could 
see Leslie all the way, as she came down, with her hand 
in her father’s arm. 

She descended beside him like a softly accompanying 
white cloud ; her dress was of tulle, without a hitch or a 
puff or a festoon about it. It had two skirts, I believe, 
but they were plain-hemmed, and fell like a mist about 
her figure. Underneath was no rustling silk, or shining 
satin ; only more mist, of finest, sheerest quaker-muslin ; 
you could not tell where the cloud met the opaque of 
soft, unstarched cambric below it all. And from her head 
to her feet fioated the shimmering veil, fastened to her 
hair with only two or three tube-rose blooms and the 
green leaves and white stars of the larger myrtle. There 
was a cluster of them upon her bosom, and she held some 
in her left hand. 

Dr. Hautayne looked nobly handsome, as he came for* 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


187 


ward to her side in his military dress ; but I think we all 
had another picture of him in our minds, — dusty, and 
battle-stained, bareheaded, in his shirt-sleeves, as he rode 
across the fire to save men’s lives. When a man has 
once looked like that, it does not matter how he ever 
merely looks again. 

Marmaduke Wharne stood close by Ruth, during the 
service. She saw his gray, shaggy brows knit themselves 
into a low, earnest frown, as he fixedly watched and lis- 
tened ; but there was a shining underneath, as still water- 
drops shine under the gray moss of some old, cleft rock ; 
and a pleasure upon the lines of the rough-cast face, that 
was like the tender glimmering of a sunbeam. 

When Marmaduke Wharne first saw John Hautayne, 
he put his hand upon his shoulder, and held him so, while 
he looked him hardly in the face. 

“ Do you think you deserve her, John ? ” the old man 
said. And John looked him back, and answered straightly, 
“ No ! ” It was not mere apt and effective reply; there 
was an honest heartful on the lips and in the eyes ; and 
Leslie’s old friend let his hand slip down along the strong, 
young arm, until it grasped the answering hand, and said 
again, — 

“ Perhaps, then, John, — you ’ll do ! ” 

“ Who giveth this woman to be married to this man ? ” 
That is what the church asks, in her service, though no- 
body asked it here to-day. But we. all felt we had a share 
to give of what we loved so much. Her father and her 
mother gave ; her girl friends gave ; Miss Trixie Spring, 
Arabel Waite, Delia, little Arctura, the home-servants, 
gathered in the door-way, all gave ; Miss Craydocke, cry- 


188 


WE GIBLS: A HOME STORY. 



ing, and disdaining her pocket-handkerchief till the tears 
trickled off her chin, because she was smiling also and 
would not cover that up, — gave ; and nobody gave with 
a more loving wrench out of a deep heart, than bluff old 
frowning Marmaduke Wharne. 

Nobody knows the comfort that we Holabirds took, 
though, in those autumn days, after all this was over, in 
our home ; feeling every bright, comfortable minute, that 
our home was our own. “ It is so nice to have it to love 
grandfather by,^’ said Ruth, like a little child. 

“Everything is so pleasant,” said Barbara, one sump* 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


189 


tuous morning. ‘‘I Ve so many nice things that I can 
choose among to do. I feel like a bee in a barrel of sugar. 
I don’t know where to begin.” Barbara had a new dress 
to make ; she had also a piece of worsted work to begin ; 
she had also two new books to read aloud, that Mrs. Scher- 
man had brought up from Boston. 

We felt rich in much prospectively ; we could afford 
things better now ; we had proposed and arranged a book- 
club ; Miss Pennington and we were to manage it ; Mrs. 
Scherman was to purchase for us. Ruth was to have 
plenty of music. Life was full and bright to us, this gold- 
en autumn-time, as it had never been before. The time 
itself was radiant ; and the winter was stored beforehand 
with pleasures ; Arctura was as glad as anybody ; she 
hears our readings in the afternoons, when she can come 
up stairs, and sit mending stockings or hemming aprons. 

We knew, almost for the first time, what it was to be 
without any pressure of anxiety. We dared to look round 
the house and see what was wearing out. We could re- 
place things — some^ at any rate — as well as not ; so we 
had the delight of choosing, and the delight of putting by ; 
it was a delicious perplexity. We all felt like Barbara’s 
bee ; and when she said that once she said it for every day, 
all through the new and happy time. 

It was wonderful how little there was, after all, that we 
did want in any hurry. We thought it over. We did 
not care to carpet the dining-room ; we liked the drugget 
and the dark wood-margins better. It came down pretty 
nearly, at last, so far as household improvements were con- 
cerned, to a new broadcloth cover for the great family table 
in the brown-room. 


190 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Barbara’s 5ee-havior, however, had its own queer fluc- 
tuations at this time, it must be confessed. Whatever 
the reason was, it was not altogether to be depended on. 
It had its alternations of humming content with a good 
deal of whimsical bouncing and buzzing and the most un- 
predictable flights. To use a phrase of Aunt Trixie’s 
applied to her childhood, but coming into new appropri- 
ateness now, Barbara “ acted like a witch.” 

She began at the wedding. Only a minute or two 
before Leslie came down, Harry Goldthwaite moved over 
to where she stood just a little apart from the rest of us, 
by the porch door, and placed himself beside her, with 
some little commonplace word in a low tone, as befitted 
the hushed expectancy of the moment. 

All at once, with an “ O, I forgot! ” she started away 
from him in the abruptest fashion, and glanced ofi* across 
the room, and over into a little side parlor beyond the 
hall, into which she certainly had not been before that 
day. She could have “ forgotten ” nothing there ; but 
she doubtless had just enough presence of mind not to 
rush up the staircase toward the dressing-rooms, at the 
risk of colliding with the bridal party. When Leslie an 
instant later came in at the double doors, Mrs. Holabird 
caught sight of Barbara again just sliding into the far, 
lower corner of the room by the forward entrance, where 
she stood looking out meekly between the shoulders and 
the floating cap-ribbons of Aunt Trixie Spring and Miss 
Arabel Waite during the whole ceremony. 

Whether it was that she felt there was something 
dangerous in the air, or that Harry Goldthwaite had 
some new awfulness in her eyes from being actually a 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


191 


commissioned officer, — Ensign Goldthwaite, now, (Rose 
had borrowed from the future, for the sake of euphony 
and effect, when she had so retorted feet and dignities 
upon her last year,) — we could not guess ; but his name 
or presence seemed all at once a centre of electrical 
disturbances in which her whisks and whirls were simply 
to be wondered at. 

“ I don’t see why he should tell me things,” was what 
she said to Rosamond one day, when she took her to task 
after Harry had gone, for making off almost before he 
had done speaking, when he had been telling us of the 
finishing of some business that Mr. Goldthwaite had 
managed for him in Newburyport. It was the sale of a 
piece of property that he had there, from his father, of 
houses and building-lots that had been unprofitable to 
hold, because of uncertain tenants and high taxes, but 
which were turned now into a comfortable round sum 
of money. 

“ I shall not be so poor now, as if I had only my pay,” 
said Harry. At which Barbara had disappeared. 

“ Why, you were both there ! ” said Barbara. 

“Well, yes; we were there in a fashion. He was 
sitting by you, though, and he looked up at you, just 
‘ then. It did not seem very friendly.” 

“ I ’m sure I did n’t notice ; I don’t see why he should 
tell me things,” said whimsical Barbara. 

“ Well, perhaps he will stop,” said Rose, quietly, and 
walked away. 

It seemed, after a while, as if he would. He could 
not understand Barbara in these days. All her nice, 
•pordial, honest ways were gone. She was always shying 


192 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


at something. Twice he was here, when she did not 
come into the room until tea-time. 

“ There are so many people,” she said, in her unrea- 
sonable manner. “ They make me nervous, looking and 
listening.” 

We had Miss Craydocke and Mrs. Scherman with us 
then. We had asked them to come and spend a week 
with us before they left Z . 

Miss Craydocke had found Barbara one evening, in the 
twilight, standing alone in one of the brown-room win- 
dows. She had come up, in her gentle, old-friendly way, 
and stood beside her. 

“ My dear,” she said, with the twilight impulse of 
nearness, — “I am an old woman. Are n’t you pushing 
something away from you, dear ? ” 

‘‘ Gw ! ” said Barbara, as if Miss Craydocke had pinched 
her. And poor Miss Craydocke could only walk away 
again. 

When it came to Aunt Roderick, though, it was too 
much. Aunt Roderick came over a good deal now. 
She had quite taken us into unqualified approval again, 
since we had got the house. She approved herself also. 
As if it was she who had died and left us something, and 
looked back upon it now with satisfaction. At least, as 
if she had been the September Gale, and had taken care 
of that paper for us. 

Aunt Roderick has very good practical eyes ; but no 
sentiment whatever. “ It seems to me, Barbara, that 
you are throwing away your opportunities,” she said, 
plainly. 

Barbara looked up with a face of bold unconsciousness 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


193 


She was brought to bay, now; Aunt Roderick could 
exasperate her, but she could not touch the nerve, as 
dear Miss Craydocke could. 

“ I always am throwing them away,” said Barbara. 
“ It ^s my fashion. I never could save corners. I always 
put my pattern right into the middle of my piece, and 
the other half never comes out, you see. What have I 
done, now ? Or what do you think I might do, just at 
present ? ” 

“ I think you might save yourself from being sorry by 
and by,” said Aunt Roderick. 

“ I ’m ever so much obliged to you,” said Barbara, 
collectedly. “ Just as much as if I could understand. 
But perhaps there ’ll be some light given. I ’ll turn it 
over in my mind. In the mean while. Aunt Roderick, 
I just begin to see one very queer thing in the world. 
You ’ve lived longer than I have ; I wish you could ex- 
plain it. There are some things that everybody is very 
delicate about, and there are some that they take right 
hold of. People might have ^ocAj^i-perplexities for years 
and years, and no created being would dare to hint or 
ask a question ; but the minute it is a case of heart or 
soul, — or they think it is, — they ‘ rush right in where 
angels fear to tread.’ What do you suppose makes the 
difference ? ” 

After that, we all let her alone, behave as she m%ht. 
We saw that there could be no meddling without mar- 
ring. She had been too conscious of us all, before any- 
body spoke. We could only hope there was no real 
mischief done, already. 

“ It ’s all of them, every one ! ” she repeated, half 


194 


WE GIELS; A HOME STORY. 


hysterically, that day, after her shell had exploded, and 
Aunt Roderick had retreated, really with great forbear- 
ance. “Miss Craydocke began, and I had to scream at 
her; even Sin Scherman made a little moral speech 
about her own wild ways, and set that baby crowing 
over me I And once Aunt Trixie ‘ vummed ’ at me. 
And I ’m sure I ain’t doing a single thing ! ” She whim- 
pered and laughed, like a little naughty boy, called to 
account for mischief, and pretending surprised innocence, 
yet secretly at once enjoying and repenting his own 
badness ; and so we had to let her alone. 

But after a while Harry Goldthwaite stayed away four 
whole days, and then he only came in to say that he was 
going to Washington to be gone a week. It was October, 
now, and his orders might come any day. Then we 
might not see him again for three years, perhaps. 

On the Thursday of that next week, Barbara said she 
would go down and see Mrs. Goldthwaite. 

“ I think it quite time you should,” said Mrs. Holabird. 
Barbara had not been down there once since the wedding- 
day. 

She put her crochet in her pocket, and we thought of 
.course she would stay to tea. It was four in the after- 
noon when she went away. 

About an hour later Olivia Marchbanks called. 

It came out that Olivia had a move to make. In fact, 
that she wanted to set us all to making moves. She pro- 
posed a chess-club, for the winter, to bring us together 
regularly ; to include half a dozen families, and meet by 
turn at the different houses. 

“I dare say Miss Pennington will have her neighbor 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


195 


hood parties again,” she said ; “ they are nice, but rather 
exhausting; we want something quiet, to come in be- 
tween. Something a little more among ourselves, you 
know. Maria Hendee is a splendid chess-player, and so 
is Mark. Maud plays with her father, and Adelaide and 
I are learning. I know you play, Rosamond, and Barba- 
ra, — does n’t she ? Nobody can complain of a chess-club, 
you see ; and we can have a table at whist for the elders 
who like it, and almost always a round game for the odds 
and ends. After supper, we can dance, or anything. Don’t 
you think it would do ? ” 

“ I think it would do nicely for one thing,” said Rose, 
thoughtfully. “ But don’t let us allow it to be the whole 
of our winter.” 

Olivia Marchbanks’s face clouded. She had put forward 
a little pawn of compliment toward us, as towards a good 
point, perhaps, for tempting a break in the game. And 
behold ! Rosamond’s knight only leaped right over it, 
facing honestly and alertly both ways. 

‘‘ Chess would be good for nothing less than once a 
week,” said Olivia. “ I came to you almost the very first, 
out of the family,” she added, with a little height in her 
manner. “ I hope you won’t break it up.” 

“ Break it up ! No, indeed ! We were all getting just 
nicely joined together,” replied Rosamond, ladylike with 
perfect temper. “ I think last winter was so really good^'* 
she went on ; “I should be sorry to break up what that 
did ; that is all.” 

“ I ’m willing enough to help in those ways,” said 
Olivia, condescendingly ; “ but I think we might have 
our own things, too.” 


196 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


“ I don’t know, Olivia,” said Rosamond, slowly, “ about 
these ‘ own things.’ They are just what begin to puzzle 
me.” 

It was the bravest thing our elegant Rosamond had 
ever done. Olivia Marchbanks was angry. She all but 
took back her invitation. 

“ Never mind,” she said, getting up to take leave. “ It 
must be some time yet ; I only mentioned it. Perhaps we 
had better not try to go beyond ourselves, after all. Such 
things are sure to be stupid unless everybody is really in- 
terested.” 

Rosamond stood in the hall-door, as she went down the 
steps and away. At the same moment, Barbara, flushed 
with an evidently hurried walk, came in. “ Why I what 
makes you so red. Rose ? ” she said. 

“ Somebody has been snubbing somebody,” replied 
Rose, holding her royal color, like her namesake, in the 
midst of a cool repose. “ And I don’t quite know whether 
it is Olivia Marchbanks or I.” 

“ A color-question between Rose and Barberry I ” said 
Ruth. “ What have you been doing. Barbie ? Why 
did n’t you stay to tea ? ” 

“ I ? I ’ve been walking, of course. — That boy has 
got home again,” she added, half aloud, to Rosamond, as 
they went up stairs. 

We knew very well that she must have been queer to 
Harry again. He would have been certain to walk home 
with her, if she would have let him. But — “ all through 
the town, and up the hill, in the daylight ! Or — stay to 
tea with him there, and make him come, in the dark I — 
And if he imagined that I knew I ” We were as sure as 


WE GIRLS. A HOME STORY. 


197 


if she had said it, that these were the things that were in 
her mind, and that these were what she had run away 
from. How she had done it we did not know ; we had 
no doubt it had been something awful. 

The next morning nobody called. Father came home 
to dinner and said Mr. Goldthwaite had told him that 
Harry was under orders, — to the “ Katahdin.” 

In the afternoon Barbara went out and nailed up the 
woodbines. Then she put on her hat, and took a great 
bundle that had been waiting for a week for somebody to 
carry, and said she would go round to South Hollow with 
it, to Mrs. Dockery. 

“ You will be tired to death. You are tired already, 
hammering at those vines,” said mother, anxiously. Moth- 
ers cannot help daughters much in these buzzes. 

“ I want the exercise,” said Barbara, turning away her 
face that was at once red and pale. “ Pounding and 
stamping are good for me.” Then she came back in a 
hurry, and kissed mother, and then she went away. 


198 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


CHAPTER XII. 

EMERGENCIES. 



RS. HOBART has a “ fire- 
gown.” That is what she calls 
it ; she made it for a fire, or for 
illness, or any night alarm ; she 
never goes to bed without hang- 
ing it over a chair-back, within 
instant reach. It is of double, 
bright-figured flannel, with a 
double cape sewed on; and a 
flannel belt, also sewed on be- 
hind, and furnished, for fasten- 
ing, with a big, reliable, easy- 
going button and button-hole. 
Up and down the front — not 
too near together — are more 
big, reliable, easy-going buttons 
and button-holes. A pair of 
quilted slippers with thick soles 
belong with this gown, and are 
laid beside it. Then Mrs. Hobart goes to bed in peace, 
and sleeps like the virgin who knows there is oil in her 
vessel. 

If Mrs. Roger Marchbanks had known of Mrs. Hobart’s 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


199 


fire-gown, and what it had been made and waiting for, 
unconsciously, all these years, she might not have given 
those quiet orders to her discreet, well-bred parlor-maid, 
by which she was never to be “ disengaged ” when Mrs. 
Hobart called. 

Mrs. Hobart has also a gown of very elegant black silk, 
with deep, rich border-folds of velvet, and a black camePs- 
hair shawl whose priceless margin comes up to within three 
inches of the middle ; and in these she has turned meekly 
away from Mrs. Marchbanks’s vestibule, leaving her in- 
consequential card, many wondering times ; never doubt- 
ing, in her simplicity, that Mrs. Marchbanks was really 
making pies, or doing up pocket-handkerchiefs ; only 
thinking how queer it was it always happened so with 
her. 

In her fire-gown she was destined to go in. 

Barbara came home dreadfully tired from her walk to 
Mrs. Dockery’s, and went to bed at eight o’clock. When 
one of us does that, it always breaks up our evening early. 
Mother discovered that she was sleepy by nine, and by 
half past we were all in our beds. So we really had a 
fair half night of rest before the alarm came. 

It was about one in the morning when Barbara woke, 
as people do who go to bed achingly tired, and sleep 
hungrily for a few eager hours. 

“ My gracious ! what a moon ! What ails it ? 

The room was full of red light. 

Rosamond sat up beside her. 

“ Moon ! It ’s fire ! ” 

Then they called Ruth and mother. Father and 
Stephen were up and out of doors in five minutes. 


200 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


The Roger Marchbaiiks’s stables were blazing. The 
wind was carrying great red cinders straight over on to 
the house roofs. The buildings were a little down on our 
side of the hill, and a thick plantation of evergreens hid 
them from the town. Everything was still as death but 
the crackling of the flames. A fire in the country, in the 
dead of night, to those first awakened to the knowledge of 
it, is a stealthily fearful, horribly triumphant thing. Not 
a voice nor a bell smiting the air, where all will soon be 
outcry and confusion ; only the fierce, busy diligence of 
the blaze, having all its own awful will, and making stead- 
fast headway against the sleeping skill of men. 

We all put on some warm things, and went right over. 

Father found Mr. Marchbanks, with his gardener, at 
the back of the house, playing upon the scorching frames 
of the conservatory building with the garden engine. Up 
on the house-roof two other men-servants were hanging 
wet carpets from the eaves, and dashing down buckets of 
water here and there, from the reservoir inside. 

Mr. Marchbanks gave father a small red trunk. “ Will 
you take this to your house and keep it safe ? ” he asked. 
And father hastened away with it. 

Within the house, women were rushing, half dressed, 
through the rooms, and down the passages and staircases. 
We went up through the back piazza, and met Mrs. Ho- 
bart in her fire-gown at the unfastened door. There was 
no card to leave this time, no servant to say that Mrs. 
Marchbanks was “ particularly engaged.” 

Besides her gown, Mrs. Hobart had her theory, all 
ready for a fire. Just exactly what she should do, first 
and next, and straight through, in case of such a thing. 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


201 


She had recited it over to herself and her family till it 
was so learned by heart that she believed no flurry of the 
moment would put it wholly out of their heads. 

She went straight up Mrs. Marchbanks’s great oak stair- 
case, to go up which had been such a privilege for the 
bidden few. Rough feet would go over it, unbidden, to 
night. 

She met Mrs. Marchbanks at her bedroom door. In 
the upper story the cook and house-maids were handing 
buckets now to the men outside. The fine parlor-maid 
was down in the kitchen at the force-pump, with Olivia and 
Adelaide to help and keep her at it. A nursery-girl was 
trying to wrap up the younger children in all sorts of 
wrong things, upside down. 

“ Take these children right over to my house,” said 
Mrs. Hobart. “ Barbara Holabird ! Come up here ! ” 

“ I don’t know what to do first,” said Mrs. Marchbanks, 
excitedly. “ Mr. Marchbanks has taken away his papers ; 
but there ’s all the silver — and the pictures — and every- 
thing ! And the house will be full of men directly ! ” 
She looked round the room nervously, and went and 
picked up her braided “ chignon ” from the dressing-table. 
Mrs. Marchbanks could “ receive ” splendidly ; she had 
never thought what she should do at a fire. She knew 
all the rules of the grammar of life ; she had not learned 
anything about the exceptions. 

“ Elijah ! Come up here ! ” called Mrs. Hobart again, 
over the balusters. And Elijah, Mrs. Hobart’s Yankee 
man-servant, brought up on her father’s farm, clattered 
up stairs in his tliick boots, that sounded on the smooth 
oak as if a horse were coming. 


202 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


Mrs. Marchbanks looked bewilderedly around her room 
again. “ They ’ll break everything ! ” she said, and took 
down a little Sevres cup from a bracket. 

“ There, Mrs. Marchbanks ! You just go off with the 
children. I ’ll see to things. Let me have your keys.” 

“ They ’re all in my upper bureau-drawer,” said Mrs. 
Marchbanks. “ Besides, there is n’t much locked, except 
the silver. I wish Matilda would come.” Matilda is 
Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks. “ The children can go there, 
of course.” 

“ It is too far,” said Mrs. Hobart. “ Go and make 
them go to bed in my great front room. Then you ’ll feel 
easier, and can come back. You’ll want Mrs. Lewis 
March banks’s house for the rest of you, and plenty of 
things besides.” 

While she was talking she had pulled the blankets and 
coverlet from the bed, and spread them on the floor. 
Mrs. Marchbanks actually walked down stairs with her 
chignon in one hand and the Sevres cup in the other. 

“ People do do curious things at fires,” said Mrs. Ho- 
bart, cool, and noticing everything. 

She had got the bureau-drawers emptied now into the 
blankets. Barbara followed her lead, and they took all 
the clothing from the closets and wardrobe. 

“ Tie those up, Elijah. Carry them off to a safe place, 
and come back, up here.” 

Then she went to the next room. From that to the 
next and the next, she passed on, in like manner, — Bar- 
bara, and by this time the rest of us, helping ; stripping 
the beds, and making up huge bundles on the floors of 
the contents of presses, drawers, and boxes. 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


203 


“ Clothes are the first thing,” said she. “ And this 
way, you are pretty sure to pick up everything.” Every- 
thing was picked up, from Mrs. Marchbanks’s jewel-case 
and her silk dresses, to Mr. Marchhanks’s shaving brushes, 
and the children’s socks that they had had pulled off last 
night. 

Elijah carried them all off, and piled them up in Mrs. 
Hobart’s great clean laundry-room to await orders. The 
men hailed him as he went and came, to do this, or fetch 
that. ‘‘ I ’m doing one thing,” he answered. “ You keep 
to yourn.” 

“ They ’re cornin’,” he said, as he returned after his 
third trip. “ The bells are ringin’, an’ they ’re a swarm- 
in’ up the hill, — two ingines, an’ a ruck o’ boys an’ men. 
Melindy, she ’s keepin’ the laundry door locked, an’ a let- 
tin’ on me in.” 

Mrs. Marchbanks came hurrying back before the 
crowd. Some common, ecstatic little boys, rushing fore- 
most to the fire, hustled her on her own lawn. She could 
hardly believe even yet in this inevitable irruption of the 
Great Uninvited. 

Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks and Maud met her and came 
in with her. Mr. Marchbanks and Arthur had hastened 
round to the rear, where the other gentlemen were still 
hard at work. 

“ Now,” said Mrs. Hobart, as lightly and cheerily as if 
it had been the putting together of a Christmas pudding, 
and she were ready for the citron or the raisins, — “ now 
— all that beautiful china ! ” 

She had been here at one great, general party, and re- 
membered the china ; although her party-call, like all hef 


204 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


others, had been a failure. Mrs. Marchbanks received a 
good many people in a grand, occasional, wholesale civil- 
ity, to whom she would not sacrifice any fraction of her 
private hours. 

Mrs. Hobart found her way by instinct to the china- 
closet, — the china-room, more properly speaking. Mrs. 
Marchbanks rather followed than led. 

The shelves, laden with costly pottery, reached from 
floor to ceiling. The polish and the colors flashed already 
in the fierce light of the closely neighboring flames. 
Great drifts and clouds of smoke against the windows 
were urging in and stifling the air. The first rush of 
water from the engines beat against the walls. 

“We must work awful quick now,’’ said Mrs. Hobart. 
“ But keep cool. We ain’t afire yet.” 

She gave Mrs. Marchbanks her own keys, which she 
had brought down stairs. That lady opened her safe and 
took out her silver, which Arthur Marchbanks and James 
Hobart received from her and carried away. 

Mrs. Hobart herself went up the step-ladder that stood 
there before the shelves, and began to hand down piles of 
plates, and heavy single pieces. “ Keep folks out, Eli- 
jah,” she ordered to her man. 

We all helped. There were a good many of us by this 
time, — Olivia, and Adelaide, and the servant-girls re- 
leased from below, besides the other Marchbankses, and 
the Hobarts, and people who came in, until Elijah 
stopped them. He shut the heavy walnut doors that led 
from drawing-room and library to the hall, and turned 
the great keys in their polished locks. Then he stood by 
the garden entrance in the sheltered side-angle, through 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


205 


which we passed with our burdens, and defended that 
against invasion. There was now such an absolute order 
among ourselves that the moral force of it repressed the 
excitement without that might else have rushed in and 
overborne us. 

“You jest keep back; it’s all right here,” Elijah 
would say, deliberately and authoritatively, holding the 
door against unlicensed comers ; and boys and men stood 
back as they might have done outside the shine and splen- 
dor and privilege of an entertainment. 

It lasted till we got well through ; till we had gone, 
one by one, down the field, across to our house, the short 
way, back and forth, leaving the china, pile after pile, 
safe in our cellar-kitchen. 

Meanwhile, without our thinking of it, Barbara had 
been locked out upon the stairs. Mother had found a tall 
Fayal clothes-basket, and had collected in it, carefully, 
little pictures and precious things that could be easily 
moved, and might be as easily lost or destoyed. Barbara 
mounted guard over this, watching for a right person to 
whom to deliver it. 

Standing there, like Casabianca, rough men rushed by 
her to get up to the roof. The hall was filling with a 
crowd, mostly of the curious, untrustworthy sort, for the 
work just then lay elsewhere. 

So Barbara held by, only drawing back with the bas- 
ket, into an angle of the wide landing. Nobody must 
seize it heedlessly ; things were only laid in lightly, for 
careful handling. In it were children’s photographs, taken 
in days that they had grown away from ; little treasures 
of art and remembrance, picked up in foreign travel, or 


206 


WE GIBLS: A HOME STORY. 


gifts of friends ; all sorts of priceless odds and ends that 
people have about a house, never thinking what would 
become of them in a night like this. So Barbara stood 

by- 

Suddenly somebody, just come, and springing in at the 
open door, heard his name. 

“ Harry ! Help me with this ! ” And Harry Gold- 
thwaite pushed aside two men at the foot of the staircase, 
lifted up a small boy and swung him over the baluster, 
and ran up to the landing. 

“ Take hold of it with me,” said Barbara, hurriedly. 
“It is valuable. We must carry it ourselves. Don’t let 
anybody touch it. Over to Mrs. Hobart’s.” 

“ Hendee ! ” called out Harry to Mark Hendee, who 
appeared below. “ Keep those people off, will you ? 
Make way 1 ” And so they two took the big basket 
steadily by the ears, and went away with it together. 
The first we knew about it was when, on their way back, 
they came down upon our line of march toward Elijah’s 
door. 

Beyond this, there was uo order to chronicle. So far, 
it seems longer in the telling than it did in the doing. 
We had to work “awful quick,” as Mrs. Hobart said. 
But the nice and hazardous work was all done. Even 
the press that held the table-napery was emptied to the 
last napkin, and all was safe. 

Now the hall doors were thrown open ; wagons were 
driven up to the entrances, and loaded with everything 
that came first, as things are ordinarily “ saved ” at a 
fire. These were taken over to Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks’s. 
Books and pictures, furniture, bedding, carpets ; quanti- 


WE GIELS; A HOME STORY. 


207 


ties were carried away, and quantities were piled up on 
the lawn. The men-servants came and looked after these ; 
they had done all they could elsewhere; they left the 
work to the firemen now, and there was little hope of 
saving the house. The window-frames were smoking, 
and the panes were cracking with the heat, and fire 
was running along the piazza roofs before we left the 
building. The water was giving out. 

After that we had to stand and see it burn. The wells 
and cisterns were dry, and the engines stood helpless. 

The stable roofs fell in with a crash, and the flames 
reared up as from a great red crater and whirlpool of fire. 
They lashed forth and seized upon charred walls and tim- 
bers that were ready, without their touch, to spring into 
live combustion. The whole southwest front of the man- 
sion was overswept with almost instant sheets of fire. 
Fire poured in at the casements ; through the wide, airy 
halls ; up and into the rooms where we had stood a little 
while before ; where, a little before that, the children had 
been safe asleep in their nursery beds. 

Mrs. Marchbanks, like any other burnt-out woman, 
had gone to the home that offered to her, — her sister-in- 
law’s ; Olivia and Adelaide were going to the Haddens ; 
the children were at Mrs. Hobart’s ; the things that, in 
their rich and beautiful arrangement, had made home^ as 
well as enshrined the Marchbanks family in their sacred- 
ness of elegance, were only miscellaneous “ loads ” now, 
transported and discharged in haste, or heaped up con- 
fusedly to await removal. And the sleek servants, to 
whom, doubtless, it had seemed that their Rome could 
never fall, were suddenly, as much as any common Bridg- 
ets and Patricks, “ out of a place.” 


208 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY 


Not that there would be any permanent difference ; it 
was only the story and attitude of a night. The power 
was still behind ; the “ Tailor ” would sew things over 
again directly. Mrs. Roger Marchbanks would be com- 
paratively composed and in order, at Mrs. Lewis’s, in a 
few days, — receiving her friends, who would hurry to 
make “ fire-calls,” as they would to make party or en*- 
gagement or other special occasion visits ; the cordons 
would be stretched again ; not one of the crowd of people 
who went freely in and out of her burning rooms that 
night, and worked hardest, saving her library and her 
pictures and her carpets, would come up in cool blood 
and ring her door-bell now ; the sanctity and the dignity 
would be as unprofanable as ever. 

It was about four in the morning — the fire still burn- 
ing — when Mrs. Holabird went round upon the out- 
skirts of the groups of lookers-on, to find and gather to- 
gether her own flock. Rosamond and Ruth stood in a 
safe corner with the Haddens. Where was Barbara ? 

Down against the close trunks of a cluster of linden- 
trees had been thrown cushions and carpets and some 
bundles of heavy curtains, and the like. Coming up be- 
hind, Mrs. Holabird saw, sitting upon this heap, two per- 
sons. She knew Barbara’s hat, with its white gull’s 
breast; but somebody had wrapped her up in a great 
crimson table-cover, with a bullion fringe. Somebody 
was Harry Goldthwaite, sitting there beside her ; Bar- 
bara, with only her head visible, was behaving, out here 
in this unconventional place and time, with a tranquillity 
and composure which of late had been apparently im- 
possible to her in parlors. 


WE GIKLS: A HOME STORY. 


2U9 



“ What will Mrs. Marchbanks do with Mrs. Hobart 
after this, I wonder ? ’’ Mrs. Holabird heard Harry say. 

“She’ll give her a sort. of brevet,” replied Barbara. 
“ For gallant and meritorious services. It will be, ‘ Our 
friend Mrs. Hobart ; a near neighbor of ours ; she was 
with us all that terrible night of the fire, you know.” 
It will be a great honor ; but it won’t be a full commis- 
sion.” 

Harry laughed. 

“ Queer things happen when you are with us,” said 
Barbara. “ First, there was the whirlwind, last year, — 
and now the fire.” 

14 


210 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


“ After the whirlwind and the fire — ” said Harry. 

“ I was n’t thinking of the Old Testament,” interrupt- 
ed Barbara. 

“ Came a still, small voice,” persisted Harry. “ If 
I ’m wicked, Barbara, I can’t help it. You put it into my 
head.” 

“ I don’t see any wickedness,” answered Barbara, 
quickly. “ That was the voice of the Lord. I suppose 
it is always coming.” 

“ Then, Barbara — ” 

Then Mrs. Holabird walked away again. 

The next day — that day, after our eleven o’clock 
breakfast — Harry came back, and was at Westover all 
day long. 

Barbara got up into mother’s room at evening, alone 
with her. She brought a cricket, and came and sat down 
beside her, and put her cheek upon her knee. 

“ Mother,” she said, softly, “ I don’t see but you ’ll 
have to get me ready, and let me go.” 

“ My dear child ! When ? What do you mean ? ” 

“ Right off. Harry is under orders, you know. And 
they may hardly ever be so nice again. And — if we are 
going through the world together — might n’t we as well 
begin to go ? ” 

“ Why, Barbara, you take my breath away I But 
then you always do ! What is it ? ” 

“ It ’s the Katahdin, fitting out at New York to join 
the European squadron. Commander Shapleigh is a 
great friend of Harry’s ; his wife and daughter are in 
New York, going out, by Southampton steamer, when 
the frigate leaves, to meet him there. They would take 


WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY. 


211 


me, he says ; and — that ’s what Harry wants, mother. 
There’ll be a little while first, — as much, perhaps, as 
we should ever have.” 

“ Barbara, my darling ! But you ’ve nothing ready ! ” 

“No, I suppose not. I never do have. Everything is 
an emergency with me ; but I always emerge ! I can 
get things in London,” she added. “ Everybody does.” 

The end of it was that Mrs. Holabird had to catch her 
breath again, as mothers do ; and that Barbara is getting 
ready to be married just as she does everything else. 

Rose has some nice things — laid away, new; she 
always has ; and mother has unsuspected treasures ; and 
we all had new silk dresses for Leslie’s wedding, and Ruth 
had a bright idea about that. 

“ I ’m as tall as either of you, now,” she said ; “ and 
we girls are all of a size, as near as can be, mother and 
all ; and we ’ll just wear the dresses once more, you see, 
and then put them right into Barbara’s trunk. They ’ll 
be all the bonnier and luckier for her, I know. We f*an 
get others any time.” 

We laughed at her at first; but we came round after- 
ward to think that it was a good plan. Rosamond’s silk 
was a lovely violet, and Ruth’s was blue ; Barbara’s own 
was pearly gray ; we were glad, now, that no two of us 
had dressed alike. The violet and the gray had been 
chosen because of our having worn quiet black-and-white 
all summer for grandfather. We had never worn crape; 
or what is called “ deep ” mourning. “ You shall never 
do that,” said mother, “ till the deep mourning comes. 
Then you will choose for yourselves.” 

We have had more time than we expected. There has 


212 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


been some beautiful delay or other about machinery, — ^ 
the Katahdin’s, that is ; and Commander Shapleigh has 
been ever so kind. Harry has been back and forth to 
New York two or three times. Once he took Stephen 
with him ; Steve stayed at Uncle John’s ; but he was down 
at the yard, and on board ships, and got acquainted with 
some midshipmen ; and he has quite made up his mind to 
try to get in at the Naval Academ}^ as soon as he is old 
enough, and to be a navy officer himself. 

W e are comfortable at home ; not hurried after all. 
We are determined not to be ; last days are too precious. 

“ Don’t let ’s be all taken up with ‘ things,’ ” says Bar- 
bara. “ I can huy ‘ things ’ any time. But now, — I 
want you ! ” 

Aunt Roderick’s present helped wonderfully. It was 
magnanimous of her; it was coals of fire. We should 
have believed she was inspired, — or possessed, — but 
that Ruth went down to Boston with her. 

There came home, in a box, two days after, from Jordan 
and Marsh’s, the loveliest “ suit,” all made and finished, 
of brown poplin. To think of Aunt Roderick’s getting 
anything made^ at an “ establishment ” ! But Ruth says 
she put her principles into her unpickable pocket, and just 
took her porte-monnaie in her hand. 

Bracelets and pocket-handkerchiefs have come from 
New York ; all the “ girls ” here in Westover have given 
presents of ornaments, or little things to wear ; they know 
there is no housekeeping to provide for. Barbara says 
her trousseau “ flies together ” ; she just has to sit and look 
at it. 

She has begged that old, garnet and white silk, though, 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


213 


at last, from mother. Ruth saw her fold it up and put it, 
the very first thing, into the bottom of her new trunk. 
She patted it down gently, and gave it a little stroke, 
just as she pats and strokes mother herself sometimes. 

“ All new things are only dreary,” she says. I must 
have some of the old.” 

“ I should just like to know one thing, — if I might,” 
said Rosamond, deferentially, after we had begun to go to 
bed one evening. She was sitting in her white night- 
dress, on the box-sofa, with her shoe in her hand. “ I 
should just like to know what made you behave so before- 
hand, Barbara? ” 

“ I was in a buzz,” said Barbara. “ And it was before- 
hand. I suppose I knew it was coming, — like a thunder- 
storm.” 

“You came pretty near securing that it should rCt 
come,” said Rosamond, “ after all.” 

“ I could n’t help that ; it was n’t my part of the affair.” 

“ You might have just kept quiet, as you were before,” 
said Rose. 

“ Wait and see,” said Barbara, concisely. ‘‘ People 
should n’t come bringing things in their hands. It ’s just 
like going down stairs to get these presents. The very 
minute I see a corner of one of those white paper parcels, 
don’t I begin to look every way, and say all sorts of things 
in a hurry ? Would n’t I like to turn my back and run 
off if I could ? Why don’t they put them under the sofa, 
or behind the door, I wonder ? ” 

“ After all — ” began Rosamond, still with the question- 
ing inflection. 

“ After all — ” said Barbara, “ there was the fire. 
That, luckily, was something else I ” 


214 


WE GIBLS: A HOME STORY 


“ Does there always have to be a fire ? ” asked Ruth, 
laughing. 

“ Wait and see,’’ repeated Barbara. “ Perhaps you ’ll 
have an earthquake.” 

We have time for talks. We take up every little chink 
of time to have each other in. We want each other in 
all sorts of ways ; we never wanted each other so, or had 
each other so, before. 

Delia Waite is here, and there is some needful stitching 
going on ; but the minutes are alongside the stitches ; they 
are not eaten up ; there are minutes everywhere. We 
have got a great deal of life into a little while ; and — 
we have finished up our Home Story, to the very present 
instant. 

Who finishes it ? Who tells it ? 

Well, — “the kettle began it.” Mrs. Peerybingle — 
pretty much — finished it. That is, the story began itself, 
then Ruth discovered that it was beginning, and began, 
first, to put it down. Then Ruth grew busy, and she 
would n’t always have told quite enough of the Ruthy 
part ; and Mrs. Holabird got hold of it, as she gets hold 
of everything, and she would not let it suffer a “ solution 
of continuity.” Then, partly, she observed ; and partly 
we told tales, and recollected and reminded ; and partly, 
here and there, we rushed in, — especially I, Barbara, — 
and did little bits ourselves ; and so it came to be a “ Song 
o’ Sixpence,” and at least four Holabirds were “ singing 
in the pie.” 

Do you think it is — sarcastically — a “ pretty dish to 
set before the king ” ? Have we shown up our friends 


WE GIRLS; A HOME STORY. 


215 


and neighbors too plainly ? There is one comfort ; nobody 

knows exactly where “ Z ’’ is ; and there are friends 

and neighbors everywhere. 

I am sure nobody can complain, if I don’t. This last 
part — the Barbarous part — is a continual breach of 
confidence. I have a great mind, now, not to respect 
anything myself ; not even that cadet button, made into 
a pin, which Ruth wears so shyly. To be sure, Mrs. 
Hautayne has one too ; she and Ruth are the only two 
girls whom Dakie Thayne considers worth a button ; but 
Leslie is an old, old friend ; older than Dakie in years, so 
that it could never have been like Ruth with her j and 
she never was a bit shy about it either. Besides — 

Well, you cannot have any more than there is. The 
story is told as far as we — or anybody •— has gone. You 
must let the world go round the sun again, a time or two ; 
everything has not come to pass yet — even with We 
Girls.” 


THE END. 



« 


■ 





i 


* 




/■ 

V-- 



705 




V 







^'V ■ . c </'^\<' . . . 

./ , '°o c^'- .‘i;,' * ' ” 


■'. V^’ 



I ' / 

•A C;.' ' . '!»«(jn~ >>, 

■* ., . <. A^ 


'^ <^ <~> y '»VJ>J- « 

O' \> ^ 

. r 

*‘ N/' A>^’ ^ 


^ 0 ’ n N C 


v^ * ^ it 



, o. , 0 '' ^ 

<■ a-' ^ "' i.'^tA''"^ ^ C' y « O.^ 

' * 0 ^ s '' ' J. ^ ^ f , 

o V. 




' rl^- %. .>%A '= 

^ , ‘/I^ \Xv ^ *“ ^ -vv^ if^y* Ji \. ^ 


. V ^ "" '^ > 

.J^, O 

V^" \'^ ... « V ■*' ^ 0 ' 

A'^ v" ' % fO' ^ 




















